Where to go when
At the end of last year, when the days around here were short, gray and wet, I brought home a copy of Where To Go When. The book describes vacation trips, sorted by month and contains sample itineraries, price ranges as well as lots and lots of beautiful photos. It’s a large-format, visually pleasing book that belongs on a coffee table and always invites browsing and daydreaming of future trips or possible adventures.
Major travel websites tend to work best when customers already have a pretty good idea what kind of trip they are looking for. It is a fairly active and probably increasingly crowded market though. More and more, companies are emerging that offer web services that aim to help customers discover trip or vacation ideas.
Intended date ranges along with desired weather are useful criteria for a vacation planning. Unfortunately, it turns out that those combinations are as of yet fairly underutilized among travel websites. I recently came across World Reviewer. They present weather data by month using an intuitive google maps mashup on their World weather page.
They do have other interesting features on their site, but the world weather visualization really stood out to me. I think, major travel websites will probably do well including similar features as additional travel planning tools.