Kango is a travel search engine, but different than Kayak or other air fare comparison services. Kango wants to help you to get your travel plan right. Once you’re where you want to go, that’s where Kango is getting interesting: normally, you would collect information from thousands of microsites (like this!) and notes from other travelers. Kango indexes all of them and with the help of semantic technology, it detects destinations, activities and so on.

At the moment it’s limited to California and Hawaii, but this will change soon.

Link: Kango

[Technorati Tags: travel search - search engine]

When planning a trip, and I mean planning, not booking, than it may be worth to have a look at airfares. Why? Airfares are very volative, that is they rise and fall over a certain peroid quickly. If you have time to follow them, it is wise to buy when they are are their lows. But how to track them? This is where Yapta comes into play.

Yapta is a plugin for IE and Firefox (Mac and Windows) which helps you to track and compare airfares for as long as you want. You can bookmark certain flights, and get messages. Handy!

Alternatives are Vayama and Farecast.

Link: Yapta

[Technorati Tags: airfare - travel ]

[Technorati Tags: surf - news - Costa Rica ]

This is an important site for any travellers:

” Step Up Travel is a travel classifieds site, established to allow local small enterprises and individuals publish web-page advertisements of their own unique cultural services, activities, and goods so that travelers can connect directly with them as an alternative to larger more commercial options.

By using Step Up Travel Classifieds and connecting directly with locals, travelers are able to learn of more obscure and fascinating activities, while also helping redirect money away from the commercial tourism industry and toward the people who make their culture what it is.

Step Up Travel was founded to help empower local enterprises compete in an industry dominated by tourism agencies. Aligning itself with the United Nations’ ST-EP initiative (Sustainable Tourism-Eliminating Poverty), Step Up Travel prides itself in being an freer marketplace for the travel industry, granting equal access to all service providers and helping redistributing wealth in a world that suffers from broadening inequalities.

Step Up Travel is also a trusted network of socially-minded travelers who can exchange ideas and recommendations, advocate for responsible travel practices, and seek meaningful interactions with local people when they travel. Through www.stepuptravel.org, Step Up Travelers have the unique opportunity to recommend and promote specific service providers they have met along the way, in order to help travelers and local people find and come to know one another.”

Well, we at Zopilote feel part of the Costa Rican lifestyle and, even don’t have a classified at StepUpTravel, we will show you the surroundings and the art of living here around Santa Teresa.

Link: StepUpTravel

[Technorati Tags: eco travel - Costa Rica ]

Docoloco has a simple idea: you know a good place to eat, to go out, to stay or to have fun, post it on Docoloco and recommend food, places, … for others - locally. You can browse for San Francisco, or Berlin in Germany as well as Melbourne in Australia.

If you need a good advise where to eat sushi, check out Docoloco. Docoloco provides you a city map including the recommendations by users, their comments and the links to theses places and businesses.
[Technorati Tags: Local search - recommendations ]

[Technorati Tags: surf - news - Costa Rica ]