According to Hitwise, an internet research company, there are now more than 12,000 travel websites aimed at UK consumers. New ones appear almost daily. Some people will greet this news with whoops of delight. Others will feel the urge to lie down in a cool, dark room. If you’re among the latter, this is for you: a list of just 10 essential travel sites.

Our selection is not based on popularity. A list of the most-visited travel sites in the UK (see box, right) does include a couple of gems, but it’s low on thrills. Indeed, four of the top 10 sites focus on road maps.

We think our selection is rather more interesting – and useful. Decide for yourselves.

EasyJet.com

Recently relaunched to incorporate fully inclusive pricing, the EasyJet website is as deceptively simple as the airline behind it. The whole booking process – from searching dates to paying by credit card – can be polished off in about three minutes. According to Team Stelios, 98% of EasyJet passengers now book online. Which makes you wonder about the sanity of the other 2% (if you book by phone, you can only book flights up to two weeks in advance, and pay 65p/min for the privilege). Just one caveat: because EasyJet.com is such a breeze to navigate, you may be tempted to use it to book your hotel, car hire, airport parking and so on. Don’t, because you can usually find better deals elsewhere.

Travelsupermarket.com

And this is where you’ll find them. Travelsupermarket.com is the UK’s most successful comparison site, taking only a few seconds to sift through thousands of “live” quotes for flights, hotels and travel insurance. The company, recently valued on the stock market at more than £800m, doesn’t actually sell anything – it just refers you to the sites with the best prices. Click through and you should find yourself on the relevant booking page. You should remember that Travelsupermarket.com is not infallible, because websites that have not paid to be featured in its listings don’t appear here. To be sure you’ve got the best deal, compare results on its rivals Traveljungle.co.uk and, for car hire, Carrentals.co.uk .

Wayn.com

Once upon a time, in the early days of the internet, travellers would post messages to each other on bulletin boards such as Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree. With the arrival of Web 2.0 and social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, that now seems terribly quaint. The latest way for travellers to get in touch and – let’s be honest here – flirt with each other is by visiting travel-networking sites such as Wayn.com – the name is short for Where Are You Now? Based in the UK, this site claims to be the world’s biggest travel community, with more than 8m members. Chances are, your soul mate is in there.

Laterooms.com

When we first wrote about Laterooms.com, in May 2000, the site was revolutionary – a place where hoteliers could quietly offload their unsold rooms (what’s known in the business as “distressed inventory”) at rock-bottom rates. Now it’s owned by First Choice, the formula remains unchanged: by booking up to seven days in advance, you can grab discounts of up to 70% on published room rates. There have been some improvements: the selection is now vast, and, as of this month, you can search for deals on web-enabled mobile phones. If you still draw a blank, you can try rival Wotif.com, which has the added advantage of a 28-day booking window.

Timesonline.co.uk/travel

Yes, we’re blowing our own trumpet here. But where else can you find more than 5,000 skilfully written and carefully researched travel articles, all easily searchable? Once inspired, you can also find exclusive deals on thousands of hotels, villas and apartments. And if you want the latest travel blogs, webcams, websites and internet booking tips, you can check out timesonline.co.uk/ onlinetravel.

Worldweather.wmo.int

With floods at home and heat waves in the southern Mediterranean, it is becoming more difficult – and more important – than ever to get the weather right when booking a holiday. Finding accurate and unbiased information isn’t always easy. Some tour operators and tourist boards provide sunshine and rainfall figures on their web pages, but these can appear optimistic when they’re compared with official meteorological statistics. If you want to know for sure whether August is a good month to visit Barbados or if there is likely to be rain in the Maldives in October, go to the World Weather Information Service, run by the World Meteorological Organization. Though the site is unlikely to win any design awards, it draws on official data to create forecasts for the next few days; it also gives monthly average temperatures, rainfall totals and the number of days that are likely to be rain-affected in more than 1,200 locations.

Simplyparking.co.uk

Another comparison site, and this one does exactly what it says on the tin. Select one of 24 airports across the UK, type in your travel dates, and it will find the best available parking deals, with choices both on and off site. Before booking, you can read reviews from previous customers, who award marks for customer service, value for money, facilities and transfers. The site will also find deals on airport hotels, airport lounges and meet-and-greet valet parkers.

Multimap.com

If you’re bemused by the huge popularity of mapping sites, a few minutes on Multimap should be enough to enlighten you. Its newly revamped UK street maps are packed with useful detail, and the driving directions are clear and easy to print. The site remembers your previous searches and allows you to send maps to your mobile phone. Coverage stretches from London to Zimbabwe, albeit in rather less detail.

(See also the Times Online' review of revamped multimap.co.uk: Ed)

TripAdvisor.co.uk

The success of user-generated content sites such as TripAdvisor is based on a curious paradox: professional hotel reviews, whether penned by travel writers or specialist tour operators, are often treated with suspicion, while extreme views posted anonymously online are viewed as more “real”. In fact, some of them are not real at all, but written by overenthusiastic hoteliers or individuals with grudges. That said, with more than 10m reviews, TripAdvisor has achieved critical mass. Its aggregated ratings – some hotels have 50 or more reviews – tend to be reliable indicators, and it is getting better at weeding out fraudulent submissions.

Expedia.co.uk

Since its launch in 1998, Expedia has eschewed bells and whistles and concentrated on building a huge inventory of hotels, flights, holidays and car-hire deals, and a reputation for reliability and trustworthiness. Essentially, it is a modern incarnation of the old-fashioned high-street travel agent, stolid rather than flashy. Although the company owns TripAdvisor, it has built up its own, more reliable collection of hotel reviews: only customers who have booked a stay at a hotel through Expedia can post a review. The company says that within the next six months it will add more multimedia content (there is talk of videos, photos and even incorporating TripAdvisor reviews). We’d advise caution. We like Expedia because it’s boring.

Top 10 by hits

1 Multimap.com – king of the map sites (see main article)

2 Maps.google.co.uk – a world of interactive and customisable maps, full of geeky features and also including new 360-degree street photography.

3 TheAA.com – everything from hotel bookings to driving tips abroad, from the AA man.

4 EasyJet.com (see main article).

5 Expedia.co.uk (see main article).

6 TheAA.com/travelwatch– road maps and travel directions.

7 Streetmap.co.uk – more maps.

8 Thomson.co.uk – Thomson’s new site is packed with multimedia gizmos, although it looks like a work in progress.

9 Nationalrail.co.uk – online train timetables; dull, but useful.

10 Lastminute.com – the jaunty design disguises an increasingly conservative offering of travel and entertainment.

Rankings from Hitwise, based on numbers of visits, June 2007