A travel website is a

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wi ...

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 rating to indi ...

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 blog The genre of travel literature encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs. One early travel memoirist in Western literature was Pausanias, a Greek geographer of the 2nd century CE. In the early modern pe ...

s 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,

Priceline.com Priceline.com is an online travel agency for finding discount rates for travel-related purchases such as airline tickets and hotel stays. The company facilitates the provision of travel services from its suppliers to its clients. Priceline.com ...

, Liberty Holidays, and Expedia. ;Service providers: Individual

airline An airline is a company that provides air transport services for traveling passengers and freight. Airlines use aircraft to supply these services and may form partnerships or alliances with other airlines for codeshare agreements, in wh ...

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 Bed and breakfast (typically shortened to B&B or BnB) is a small lodging establishment that offers overnight accommodation and breakfast. Bed and breakfasts are often private family homes and typically have between four and eleven rooms, wit ...

cruise line A cruise line is a company that operates cruise ships that operate on ocean or rivers and which markets cruises to the public. Cruise lines are distinct from passenger lines which are primarily concerned with transportation of passengers. Though ...

s, 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 A search engine is an information retrieval software program that discovers, crawls, transforms and stores information for retrieval and presentation in response to user queries. A search engine normally consists of four components, that are sear ...

to look for bookings within a certain timeframe, service class, geographic location, or price range. ;Online travel agencies:

Travel agency A travel agency is a private retailer or public service that provides travel and tourism-related services to the general public on behalf of accommodation or travel suppliers to offer different kinds of travelling packages for each destinati ...

websites selling travel and tourism services. ;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). 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 bureaus, which usually sponsor a website dedicated to promoting

tourism Tourism is travel for pleasure or business; also the theory and practice of touring, the business of attracting, accommodating, and entertaining tourists, and the business of operating tours. The World Tourism Organization defines tourism mor ...

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

Las Vegas Las Vegas (; Spanish for "The Meadows"), often known simply as Vegas, is the 25th-most populous city in the United States, the most populous city in the state of Nevada, and the county seat of Clark County. The city anchors the 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. ;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 p ...

s. These include: 9flats,

Airbnb Airbnb, Inc. ( ), based in San Francisco, California, operates an online marketplace focused on short-term homestays and experiences. The company acts as a broker and charges a commission from each booking. The company was founded in 2008 b ...

BeWelcome Social networking services where hosts do not receive payments are called hospitality exchange services (HospEx). The relationships on hospitality exchange services are shaped by altruism and are related to the cyber-utopianism on the Web in its ...

CouchSurfing CouchSurfing is a hospitality exchange service by which users can request 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, and while ho ...

Friendship Force International Friendship Force International (FFI) is a nonprofit organization with the mission of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, friendship, and intercultural competence via homestays. The organization operates in more than 60 countr ...

, 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. History The first hospitality exchange service based on in ...

, Intervac International, OYO Rooms,

Pasporta Servo The Pasporta Servo ( en, Passport Service) is a hospitality exchange service available both online and in print that lists people in Esperanto culture who are willing to offer free homestays to speakers of Esperanto. It is maintained by the Wor ...

, Servas International, ThirdHome, Tripping.com,

Warm Showers Warm Showers (WS) is a non-profit hospitality exchange service for people engaging in bicycle touring. The platform is a gift economy — hosts are not supposed to charge for lodging and are not bound. The legal form is a Colorado 501(c)(3) non ...

, Workaway, and

WWOOF World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF, ), or World Wide Organization of Organic Farms, is a loose network of national organizations that facilitate homestays on organic farms. , Australia with 2,600 hosts has the most host farms an ...

References

{{Travel ticket search engines

Categories

See also

References