Category: travel sites

Individual airlines , hotels , bed and breakfasts , cruise lines , automobile rental companies, and other travel-related service providers often maintain their own web sites providing retail sales. Though Expedia won’t charge you any money to change or cancel a flight as part of a vacation package, the airline may charge you a fee to change it. This may apply if you use airline credit received from cancelling a non-refundable flight to book a new flight for the same primary passenger on the same airline (though you can change the dates, times, and departure/arrival locations).

Along those lines, consider the results of a new Expedia Media Solutions study , performed in collaboration with Compete The study found that travelers who visited a destination marketing organization (DMO) site, such as VisitBritain, within the 45 days prior to booking a vacation package on an online travel agency site, made 38 visits …

In the wrong hands, studies like this will encourage people to launch trip-planning startups. There are two travel websites where the rationale of the crowdsourcing is clear for the contributor as all edits to these are under copyleft license (CC-BY-SA): the ad-free Wikivoyage operated by Wikimedia Foundation and Wikitravel by a for-profit entity.

But while there may be less legwork involved, the Internet has created a new problem: With countless sites and online services out there, it’s hard to know which ones are actually worth your time ‘” which may explain why the average traveler visits a whopping 38 websites before actually booking a trip.

This, in turn, requires new travel services like Gogobot to serve up dynamically generated pages with personal recommendations derived from individual preferences gleaned either from past behavior on a site, similar travelers or from a social graph.

This means when someone in your social graph …