A travel website is a

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

that provides travel

review A review is an evaluation of a publication, product, service, or company or a critical take on current affairs in literature, politics or culture. In addition to a critical evaluation, the review's author may assign the work a content rating, ...

s, trip fares, or a combination of both. Over 1.5 billion people book travel per year, 70% of which is done online.

Categories

Categories of travel websites include: ;Travelogues and blogs: People writing travel blogs about their own experiences, sometimes including advice for travelling in particular areas, or in general. ;Review websites: Some examples of websites that use a combination of travel reviews and the booking of travel are

TripAdvisor Tripadvisor is an American company that operates online travel agency, travel agencies, comparison shopping websites, and mobile apps with user-generated content. Its namesake brand, Tripadvisor.com, operates in 40 countries and 20 languages, and ...

, Priceline.com, Liberty Holidays, and

Expedia Expedia Inc. is an online travel agency owned by Expedia Group, based in Seattle. The website and mobile app can be used to book airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, cruise ships, and vacation packages. Expedia.com was launched on ...

. ;Service providers: Individual

airline An airline is a company that provides civil aviation, air transport services for traveling passengers or freight (cargo). Airlines use aircraft to supply these services and may form partnerships or Airline alliance, alliances with other airlines ...

hotel A hotel is an establishment that provides paid lodging on a short-term basis. Facilities provided inside a hotel room may range from a modest-quality mattress in a small room to large suites with bigger, higher-quality beds, a dresser, a re ...

bed and breakfast A bed and breakfast (typically shortened to B&B or BnB) is a small lodging establishment that offers overnight accommodation and breakfast. In addition, a B&B sometimes has the hosts living in the house. ''Bed and breakfast'' is also used to ...

s, 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: Travel agency websites selling travel and tourism services. ;Fare aggregators and metasearch engines: Metasearch engines conduct searches across multiple independent

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

s. 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 The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

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). Aggregators usually take a cut of each sale made through their websites. ;Blogs and 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 A guide book or travel guide is "a book of information about a place designed for the use of visitors or tourists". It will usually include information about sights, accommodation, restaurants, transportation, and activities. Maps of varying det ...

, 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 bureau A destination marketing organization (DMO) is an organisation which promotes a location as an attractive travel destination. DMOs are known as tourist boards, tourism authorities or "Convention and Visitors Bureaus". They primarily exist to provide ...

s, which usually sponsor a website dedicated to promoting

tourism Tourism is travel for pleasure, and the Commerce, commercial activity of providing and supporting such travel. World Tourism Organization, UN Tourism defines tourism more generally, in terms which go "beyond the common perception of tourism as ...

in their respective regions. Cities that rely on tourism also operate websites promoting their destinations, such as VEGAS.com for

Las Vegas Las Vegas, colloquially referred to as Vegas, is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and the county seat of Clark County. The Las Vegas Valley metropolitan area is the largest within the greater Mojave Desert, and second-l ...

. ;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. ;Homestays: There are several travel websites that specialize in organizing

homestay Homestay (also home stay and home-stay) is a form of hospitality and lodging whereby visitors share a residence with a local of the area (host) to which they are traveling. The length of stay can vary from one night to over a year and can be prov ...

s. These include: 9flats,

Airbnb Airbnb, Inc. ( , an abbreviation of its original name, "Air Bed and Breakfast") is an American company operating an online marketplace for short-and-long-term homestays, experiences and services in various countries and regions. It acts as a ...

, BeWelcome,

CouchSurfing CouchSurfing is a hospitality exchange service by which users can request free short-term homestays or interact with other people who are interested in travel. It is accessible via a website and mobile app. It uses a subscription business model ...

, Friendship Force International, HomeExchange.com,

Hospitality Club Hospitality Club (HC) was a hospitality exchange service (a gift economy network for finding homestays whereby hosts were not allowed to charge for lodging) accessible via a website. HC's specified goals were to facilitate "intercultural unde ...

, Intervac International, OYO Rooms, Pasporta Servo, Servas International, ThirdHome, Tripping.com, Warm Showers,

Workaway Workaway is a platform that allows members to arrange homestays and cultural exchange. Volunteers or "workawayers", are expected to contribute a pre-agreed amount of time per day in exchange for lodging and food, which is provided by their host ...

, and

WWOOF World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF, ), or World Wide Organization of Organic Farms, is a network of national organizations that facilitate homestays on organic farms. There is no central list or organization that encompasses all W ...

References

{{Travel ticket search engines

Categories

See also

References