StoodThere.com

StoodThere.com can inspire your next trip via photos from travelers who have been there, shot that. You won't be intimidated by glorious artsy travel photos impossible to re-create for your own albums, but you will find snapshots of places you might visit one day.

www.bluehippotravel.com

Let a former travel agent help you find a hotel you might not know existed on Blue Hippo Travel, www.bluehippotravel.com.

www.bing.com/travel

The travel section of Bing (www.bing.com/travel) is one of the major upsides to Microsoft's new search engine.

Airbnb.com

Airbnb.com lets travelers find a spare room for two or three nights by renting spare rooms, cots, couches and airbeds in the apartments of residents in 831 U.S. cities, sometimes for as little as $20 a night.

JunctionBus.Com

JunctionBus.Com helps travelers find cheap buses between cities in the northeast of the United States, the Midwest and (to a lesser extent) the Southeast.

Voyij.com

Voyij.com seduces your inner accountant with travel deals that are ready to be taken advantage of this weekend. What's Hot: Typing in your departure airport and getting a bucket-load of travel deals that are good right away or three months from now. The deals are broken down into airfare, hotel and vacation. When you click on a search result, it gives you the weather forecast and Yelp reviews too.

Raveable.com

Keep your eye on Raveable.com, a new hotel review collection website that considers itself the ``Cliffs-Notes for hotel reviews.''

WholeTravel.com and VroomVroomVroon.com

Companies are popping up left and right to help travelers looking for ways to reduce their environmental impact. Two brand-new sites are WholeTravel.com, which lists and ranks ''green'' hotels and activity outfitters (e.g. horseback riding, white-water rafting) and VroomVroomVroom.com, a rental car booking site boasting both low prices and low guilt factor: The company donates carbon offsets for every rental.

DiscoverAmerica.com

A new website has been launched to help Americans explore their own country: DiscoverAmerica.com. The site includes an interactive map that gives mileage from city to city, an activity finder listing more than 3,000 experiences, attractions and events, including museums, gardens, ski slopes, festivals and parks.

CodySmart.com/hitchhike

Cody Smart wanted to feel something, and so with $430 in the bank, an aversion to ''popular society'' and a thirst for the open road, he set off to hitchhike from New York to Alaska. He was robbed and nearly killed, just as the naysayers said he would be. He then put together a magnetic ''photologue'' on CodySmart.com/hitchhike to remember and share his story.

BoardingArea.com

BoardingArea.com is a virtual briefcase for business travelers. It's a portal for handpicked travel blogs from the media, industry insiders and other business travelers.

SpottedbyLocals.com

Ever wish you knew a local who could offer advice before your European trip? SpottedbyLocals.com has handpicked bloggers on the ground in 20 cities updating its city blogs with their favorite spots around town.

Twitter.com

There's a budding travel trend on Twitter.com. The micro-blogging tool on which users send short messages, or ''tweets,'' has become a hot networking tool for the Web-savvy travel community. Airlines and hotels reach out to their customers and offer personal service and tips, while travel bloggers befriend and keep tabs on colleagues. But what about the average consumer? Bargain-hunters can cash in on travel giveaways and sales. We recently found @fairmonthotels running Twitter-only contests and...

Travelsavvymom.com

Travelsavvymom.com offers personal recommendations for family-friendly hotels and travel gear from parents you can trust. What's hot: The quality. The moms who contribute regularly have written for Smithsonian, New York Times, Washington Post, Parenting, Utne Reader, Christian Science Monitor and others. The hotel reviews are written by moms who stayed somewhere family friendly and liked it enough to write an unsolicited review. The TravelSavvy partners then vet the reviews to make sure they're legitimate...

Tripfilms.com

If your travel budget is getting the life squeezed out of it by a big metal vice clamp, it might be time to do a little armchair traveling. Tripfilms.com can take you all over the world, and it doesn't cost more than your Internet connection.

GeckoGo.com

A helpful travel community is forming at GeckoGo.com. It tells you the best times (and the not-so-great ones) for travel tailored to your specific interests.

Costtodrive.com

Planning a summer road trip? Costtodrive.com calculates the cost of gasoline in seconds. What's hot: Punch in your starting point and destination, add the year, make and model of the car you're driving, then click the little red gas pump and find out how much it will cost you to get there. Travelers will appreciate the side-by-side information from Kayak that tells you how much it would cost to fly instead. Need directions? It has a Google map of your route, plus a link to directions from Mapquest...

Triporati.com

Triporati.com is loaded with travel inspiration and trip recommendations from expert travel writers willing to share the best of their favorite global playgrounds.

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