Good Travel Sites

I've found a few sites online that are especially nice for searching for travel related stuff.

Flights: kayak.com
Hotels: agoda.com
CouchSurfing: couchsurfing.com

The first searches ~100 sites and allows you to sort via price, schedule, airline, etc.. Interface is fairly easy to use. Very nice features (such as previous searches available with a single click) and the site as a whole isbig time-saver compared to using expedia, travelocity, etc.. It searches those sites, too, by the way.

Agoda searches for hotels and other high-class accomodations. At least for Hong Kong, it gave me much better rates than most of the other sites I found. It doesn't list the $20/night youth hostel-style places, but there are other sites that seem to address that market.

I owe my knowledge of CouchSurfing.com to Speek. They're a site built completely to encourage exchange of crash space for travelers who aren't too picky about their accommodations and can do some very basic planning ahead*. Speek has had good experience with this throughout Europe, but I have yet to try it myself.

* A summary of my understanding. Their actual mission is:

"What is the CouchSurfing mission?

When we incorporated CouchSurfing International, Inc. as a non-profit, we filed our official mission statement as:

"CouchSurfing seeks to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance, and facilitate cultural understanding."

As a community we strive to do our individual and collective parts to make the world a better place, and we believe that the surfing of couches is a means to accomplish this goal. CouchSurfing isn't about the furniture- it's not just about finding free accommodations around the world- it's about participating in creating a better world. We strive to make a better world by opening our homes, our hearts, and our lives. We open our minds and welcome the knowledge that cultural exchange makes available. We create deep and meaningful connections that cross oceans, continents and cultures. CouchSurfing wants to change not only the way we travel, but how we relate to the world! "

- http://www.couchsurfing.com/help.html, Accessed 4 minutes before this post.