THE BIG BOYS

1. Tripadvisor has gone from strength to strength this year, celebrating its 20 millionth traveller review in October and launching sites in India and Japan in the latter half of the year. The India site is in English - which makes it a great source of finding good hotels and guesthouses across the country. The site continues to amuse with its top ten hotels and destinations lists - in March we reported on its Britain's dirtiest hotels compilation- and that's not the saucy kind.

2. Cheapflights continues to impress with its expanding directory of travel tips, from the ski airports guide we featured in November that lists the closest ski resorts to seven European ski airports, to the flying with pets guide. The site quietly relaunched in March to improve useability, but kept its simple, clean design.

3. Rival price comparison site Skyscanner has also been busy this year. We reported on its WhoFlies Widget in November, the decision to add intuitive text to its drop-down menus in September, and now we hear there's a new device they're calling a "Flight Search Widget" in the offing. It'll appear on other websites as a stand-alone flight search box so users don't have to leave the site they're on to research flight prices.

SITES FOR TRAVEL NERDS

4. Want a peek at the sites of the future? In October we reported on the Hotels.com Visualiser and in November the Ving Tripfinder - two next-generation menus that make finding a holiday that bit more fun. Not available for the UK market yet, but it's a taste of what's to come.

5. Want to know the gossip from the cockpit? The Professional Pilots’ Rumour Network is the place. We loved the “your nicest celebrities” forum, with its Boris Becker quote, featured in our October websites to watch. If that's not nerdy enough, there's Flyertalk, parts of which are incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't know their 737s from their 318s. That said, there's some gems on frequent flyer programmes and the latest routing news from those in the know - the poor souls who live out of a suitcase.

6. In October we also reported on a rival to one of our favourite nerdy sites, Seatguru.com. The cheeky upstart is seatplans.com, which launched out of the Business Traveller stable in September. Now there's no excuse for not finding that extra legroom even if your budget doesn't stretch to business class.

7. Postcards too 20th century for you? Impress your techie chums with a postcard of yourself generated, written and sent from www.ppme.co.uk for a mere 99 pence a piece to deliver in the UK.

8. Onebag.com has held its own in the travel category of Delicious.com since we first mentioned it back in April. It's a little pedantic to print a checklist before packing a suitcase to go on holiday, but for those who need persuasion, the “Do I really need a packing list?” link should sell it.

9. Our first websites round up, back in February, lauded FlightStats.com as a site that will appear to the nerdier traveller because it's stuffed full of statistics. The global airport flight delay index might make depressing reading but it'll tell you whether to pack a Jilly Cooper or a Tolstoy for airport reading.

HIGH DESIGN

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