What Are The Best New Travel-Booking Sites?

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Take a trip around the web and check out alternative online travel agents. : Bet_Noire/ThinkStock

The Internet should make booking a trip easier. If only. Let s not forget that today s web is first and foremost a marketplace and the market for travel-booking and search sites is crowded, which can make planning your next journey a little daunting.

On one side, you have online travel agencies such as Priceline and Expedia. on the other mega-search engines such as Google and Bing offering their own flight and hotel search options. In the middle, aggregators such as Kayak ostensibly allow users to compare everyone else s screamin deals (I say ostensibly because many of these aggregators are now owned by the agencies, making things a little, you know, conflict-y).

Mercifully, a new wave of travel sites has popped up to try to muffle (and compete with) some of this noise, each appealing to a specific stripe of traveler or trip.

Rather than just find the cheapest seats a la Priceline and Expedia, Routehappy s database can search by roomiest seat, in-seat power and best IFE. Such amenities may drive up ticket prices a bit, but the site is banking on the fact that some fliers will pay more for a more civilized flight.

Like Routehappy, this aggregator sells saner travel, sorting flights by shortest length, fewest layovers and lowest price. You can also search for hotels by ecstasy ranking, not to mention track your site history, so you can access it later. Throw in a killer interface and Hipmunk gets my vote for one of the finest travel sites around.