Travel website

Categories

Categories of travel websites include:

• Travelogues/Blogs - See Travel literature#Travel blogs.

• Review websites - Some examples of websites that use a combination of travel reviews and the booking of travel are TripAdvisor, Priceline.com, Liberty Holidays, and Expedia.

• Service providers - 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. Many with complex offerings include some sort of search engine technology to look for bookings within a certain timeframe, service class, geographic location, or price range.

• Online travel agencies - See travel agency.

• Fare aggregators and metasearch engines - Metasearch engines conduct searches across multiple independent search engines. Metasearch engines often make use of "screen scraping" to get live availability of flights. Screen scraping is a way of crawling through the airline websites, getting content from those sites by extracting data from the same HTML feed used by consumers for browsing (rather than using a Semantic Web or database feed designed to be machine-readable). Metasearch engines usually process incoming data to eliminate duplicate entries, but may not expose "advanced search" options in the underlying databases (because not all databases support the same options).

• Blogs/News sites on current travel discounts - Travel bargain websites collect and publish bargain rates by advising consumers where to find them online (sometimes but not always through a direct link). Rather than providing detailed search tools, these sites generally focus on offering advertised specials, such as last-minute sales from travel suppliers eager to deplete unused inventory; therefore, these sites often work best for consumers who are flexible about destinations and other key itinerary components.

• Travel and tourism guides - Many websites take the form of a digital version of a traditional guide book, aiming to provide advice on which destinations, attractions, accommodations, and so on, are worth a visit and providing information on how to access them. Most states, provinces and countries have their own convention and visitor bureaus, which usually sponsor a website dedicated to promoting tourism in their respective regions. Cities that rely on tourism also operate websites promoting their destinations, such as VEGAS.com for Las Vegas.

• Social travel website - A social travel website is a type of travel website that will look at where the user is going and pair them with other places they want to go based on where other people have gone.^[2]

• Homestays - There are several travel websites that specialize in organizing homestays. These include: 9flats, Airbnb, BeWelcome, CouchSurfing, Friendship Force International, HomeExchange.com, Hospitality Club, Intervac International, OYO Rooms, Pasporta Servo, Servas International, ThirdHome, Tripping.com, Warm Showers, Workaway, and WWOOF

See also

• Travel technology – Application of Information Technology or Information and Communications Technology in the travel, tourism and hospitality industry

References