Several of these new travel sites depend on user submissions, so consider contributing your own experiences to one or more of the sites below after your next getaway.
1. Where's Yours?
Where's Yours? is a new travel site that encourages visitors to stick a virtual pin on an interactive map to identify a favorite place in nature and write a 250-word, journal-like entry describing its merit. The site allows visitors to add photos and rate places based on beauty, remoteness, value, and intensity. Pro: Find recommendations for outdoor sites to visit when you travel.
Con: If you think the best thing about being in nature is solitude, why lead strangers to your hideaway?
2. SuperTour
Like What's Yours, the new travel site SuperTour opens with a map of the United States. It exhorts visitors to "take a digital journey" to a destination and explore its hotels, restaurants, activities, and more so that they can get a sense of a place before they travel there. Pro: Features a convenient travel booking engine for impulse buyers.
Con: Site is very new and was in beta when inspected. Only one destination (Miami) was live, but it failed to load.
3. MSN Travel
MSN's relaunched Travel hub (still in beta at this writing) allows users to access 78,000+ pages of content from partners that include Eyewitness Top 10 Travel Guides, Expedia, TripAdvisor, Frommer's, Travel + Leisure, and the Travel Channel. On the new site, travel ers can compare prices, book trips, watch slide shows and travel videos, and post to message boards. Pro: Contributors are reputable travel brands.
Con: Uneven quality, voice, consistency, and depth of information.
4. Booking Buddy
Booking Buddy isn't exactly a new travel site — it's been around since at least 2003 — but it remains a simple way to search multiple travel sites for flights, hotels, cars, cruises. Now there are two new and noteworthy additions to this travel site: Users can search for deals by category and add content RSS feeds. Pro: Uncluttered, smart, and easy-to-use interface.
Con: Click through to a deal and you may find the price has changed.
5. easyCruise
Launched in 2005 as the no-frills way to cruise the Mediterranean and Caribbean, easyCruise attracts passengers more than 20 years younger than the average luxury cruiser. Shaking up the formula established by other cruise lines, easyCruise permits passengers to sail for as long or as short as they like and ships stay in port overnight, allowing for more shore exploration. New ships and ports of call are in the pipeline. Pro: Cheap.
Con: Cabins are tiny; services and facilities are minimal.
6. ESPN Sports Travel
Extending its franchise, ESPN recently created a travel hub on its site that serves as a sports fan's guide to travel. It features a sports calendar that includes everything from NASCAR to the NFL dates and a list of "sports destinations." While we never thought of Vegas in that category, it's there along with information on gambling, bachelor parties, golf courses, and sports bars. Pro: Helps sports fans plan a trip to pursue a passion.
Con: What if one of you isn't a sports fan?
7. Kayak Fare Buzz
Although not a new travel site, Kayak has recently added Kayak Fare Buzz. This enables a user to search quickly for the best airfares from a designated city or airport. For example, if you live in New York, you can have Kayak Fare Buzz return a list of the 25 most searched-for destinations from NYC and the lowest prices in the month you select. Pro: Good tool if you want to travel but haven't chosen a destination yet.
Con: Cheaper flights often can be found elsewhere.
8. Travelicio.us
If you believe you can never have enough information on a place before you travel there, Travelicio.us can add to your data bank. It gathers the latest articles from the BootsnAll Travel Network and del.icio.us on many different regions of the world, and you can drill down to where you want to go to learn more about it and see relevant Flickr photos.9. Turn Here
Turn Here is a travel site originally based on a clever idea: aggregate free, short amateur videos of travel destinations around the world; catalog them by location; and let users watch them online or download to an iPod. Pro: Talents emerge: The curator of a Western Massachusetts museum takes viewers on an entertaining tour of the modern art collection.
Con: Turn Here has turned into an intermediary that supplies its videos to large portals. On some travel videos the photography is amateurish and scenes are poorly lit. Ad libs can be inane.
