I have two primary concerns when booking a travel, one that I don't end up at a boring place and two that I can manage it in the most economical way. Google search helps me figure that out pretty well. Google Maps are great when I'm actuall at that location. TripAdvisor has nice information. Airticket listing sites are a necessity. AirBnb works well for places to stay. Lot of hostel booking sites in Europe work well. But I haven't found one single tool that can handle all that exhaustively.
Way too many travel planning softwares try aggregating resources from across the internet, just posting it in varied forms. But they don't really give me the confidence that it's the cheapest and the best place I can be at. Moreover, when you look carefully at them, they skimp the details -- the prices and timings are usually way off. To top, if they try to put a fees on top of the original price, it adds to the cost without actually providing any ease. So I still have to resort to going to the original source of the content or just doing my own research. Also, many of the travel planning softwares overlook the fact that motivating people to go for a new trip is a huge challenge. It's also interesting to note that the blogpost was written over 2 years ago and is still true.
"cheapest and the best place I can be at" -- that phrase is entirely too subjective to be able to actually easily solve. I know for myself, say on the Big Island of Hawaii (a place I know pretty well), "best place" can incorporate temporal concerns, desire for beaches or mountains/hiking, maybe a place with a kitchen vs. sustaining one's self on market goods and restaurants. Those three variables could describe at least four different places on the island in my own mind. How does that get mapped to a general site?
Exactly! Every person has his own concerns about planning a trip and the problem is too subjective. That's why I said, I have to resort to my own research to figure out the place, instead of depending on a travel planning app. Travelogues and ratings posted on blogs and TripAdvisor give me a better idea of what to do, compared to a list of things generated by an App.
A question I'd love to have answered - I want a flight that is within min/max miles and costs less than a certain point intersected with a certain class of lodging within a certain price range. Available "amenities" of the location a gravy filter.
I wanted a site that gave me the confidence I was looking at all the places to stay in a destination, including the actual prices from every site. Nobody was combining airbnb with hotels and Hotwire and all the other sites I checked. I ended up building it myself: http://AllTheRooms.com.
Way too many travel planning softwares try aggregating resources from across the internet, just posting it in varied forms. But they don't really give me the confidence that it's the cheapest and the best place I can be at. Moreover, when you look carefully at them, they skimp the details -- the prices and timings are usually way off. To top, if they try to put a fees on top of the original price, it adds to the cost without actually providing any ease. So I still have to resort to going to the original source of the content or just doing my own research. Also, many of the travel planning softwares overlook the fact that motivating people to go for a new trip is a huge challenge. It's also interesting to note that the blogpost was written over 2 years ago and is still true.