Travelpaucity: In search of a killer travel web site

The travel planning industry has obviously been revolutionized in the last 10-15 years. But although the phrase “travel web site” now generates 328,000 hits on Google, I still haven’t found one that matches the way I like to plan vacations.

If you already know where you want to go, it’s fairly easy to find the best price available. If you are completely flexible, it’s fairly easy to find bargains. When I plan vacations, however, I am constrained mostly by time and budget, and I want to know all my options before making a decision.

Fifteen years ago, I might have sat down with a real human travel agent and given him or her the following very broad parameters:

• The earliest date I could leave
• The latest date I could return
• The most I was willing to spend on air, hotel, food, and other expenses combined
• The general part of the world I wanted to visit (e.g. the Southwest U.S., Central Europe, the Caribbean, etc.)

The travel agent might then have spent some time combing through catalogs, researching a bunch of options, and preparing a recommendation. But now I can’t expect a travel agent to do this kind of research for me because there’s no margin in it any more.

If anyone out there knows of a site that will take the type of guidelines I outlined above and spit out a sortable list of options, please let me know. In the meantime, I’ll have to rely on the sites recommended by Kiplinger.com as well as my favorite airfare search engine, at ita Software.