Best Travel Sites - Forbes.com

Best Travel Sites - Forbes.com: "After the dot-com bubble burst five years ago, practically the only Web companies that didn�t vanish were the travel sites....Travelocity had revenue of $830 million on bookings of $7.4 billion in 2005. What bubble?...

...According to Harteveldt, online leisure travel is the largest e-commerce category (excluding porn), and in the U.S. it is projected to generate $74.4 million in sales in 2006, an increase of almost 17% over the $63.6 billion spent in 2005. By 2009, Forrester Research predicts, online travel spending in the U.S. will rise to $110.5 billion.

Overseas, online travel planning is picking up steam even faster than it is in the U.S. Spending on online travel in the U.K. and Western Europe will rise about 42% to €30.7 billion in 2006, or about $36.8 billion, Harteveldt says. By the end of the decade that number will approach €50 billion, or about $60 billion...

We didn’t include Expedia, Orbitz or Travelocity, since the general public is mostly already aware of these sites. Instead, we included unusual sites offering something different to the consumer, like FlyerTalk.com, which allows fliers to figure out the savviest uses for their accumulated frequent flier miles. Of course, some well-known sites did make the list, but for less-than-obvious reasons: We listed Priceline.com not for flights, but because it’s the best site we know of for booking luxury hotels cheaply.

We rated the sites according to three criteria: aesthetic appeal, user friendliness and usefulness. In other words, they had to be easy to look at and easy to navigate, and they had to make life easier for you. We hope they do just that..."

All have a particular angle (niche) for example:
HotelChatter.com.....is an uncensored compendium of hotel reviews from all over the world: The good, the bad and the disgusting get equal weight...

Kayak.com...Unlike many of the major travel Web sites, Kayak.com includes flight listings from budget air carriers like Jet Blue and Spirit Airlines. It also has user-friendly features, like remembering your home airport, letting you search more than one airport simultaneously

MyTripJournal.com...Personal travel blogs have overtaken mass e-mails as the tool of choice for staying in touch with family and friends while on the road..

Site59.com’s niche is the last-minute weekend getaway

TravelZoo.com is more effective at offering cheap fares than any other Web site

Priceline.com revolutionized the way consumers bought travel, allowing them to name their own prices for everything from hotels to flights to rental cars....