360DigitalInfluence

In the last few weeks, two new online travel sites have been hot topics in the news – Google City Tours and Bing Travel, from Microsoft. Although the sites have different uses, both are designed to help travelers plan vacations easily.

Google City Tours is a service designed to create entire trips for travelers, identifying points of interest in the desired city and planning out an itinerary for a multi-day vacation. A different approach to online travel, Bing is a travel aggregate site, similar to Kayak or Orbitz. The site allows users to search for airfare deals or sort hotel results by popularity, star rating or distance from a certain location.

From a marketing perspective, I like Bing’s easy-to-use interface and multiple options for finding the best deal – a factor that always plays into my vacations – but didn’t think it was very visually pleasing. I searched the “Low Fares” tab for a flight to London, since I’ve always wanted to go there, and especially liked the graph that appears detailing when flights will be least expensive. I still haven’t been able to test Google City Tours, as it freezes my entire computer as soon as launch the site (It is a beta site, but still…)

With more and more travelers using the internet to book their vacations, sites like these will continue to appear, promising the best deals or most comprehensive search engines. Now if only I could find someone to pay for that vacation to London…

What’s your preferred travel search engine?