The best travel websites and how to find them

In my last post I talked about how it’s tough to keep tab of the millions of new online travel tools added by the second. It’s useless to keep tab if you can’t distinguish the ones with credibility from the others, but spending hours looking through them and testing their functionality is overwhelming and oh-so-mindnumbing — another reason why you tend to stick to your older but tried-and-tested travel resources.

Ever since I’ve gotten into this industry, I normally start any concrete search from Transitions Abroad. It has genuine, authentic content and I have not yet seen any website quite as resourceful as this one.

In his latest article on Transitions Abroad, Contrarian Traveler Tim Leffel has gone a step further and done a fantastic job of screening out the crap and pointing you in the right direction when you begin any travel-tool search online.

To find credible sites on your own, he says:

• Start by looking at ones referred to in updated guidebooks (they normally do a good job of filtering out the rubbish).
• The newer and perhaps more authentic sites unfortunately will appear on the 2nd/3rd pages of your Google or Yahoo search (the more commercial ones always pop-up first), so do take the effort to look through the pages.
• See how explicit the sites you choose are, they are not credible if they have more ads than content.

Read (and bookmark!) the full article here.