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Some people ask me to help booking their trips. They ask me because usually I found cheaper flights and hotels. So the question is not if exists any flight or hotel booking site as Kayak, Trivago or the service offered by travel agencies. The question is if there is any service that given a vague description of the travel you want, find the best options.

For example, if you ask for a trip "between March 2nd and 10th to a caribbean beach", they offer a touristic package to Cuba from 3rd to 10th, a flight to maldives islands in a 4* hotel, etc. The idea is that you just describe the trip you want and they give you some budget options.

I'd like to know if there is such page to redirect all my friends who ask me to do their holiday finding job :)

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I think this is highly depends on country your friends are from. – VMAtm Jan 17 '12 at 11:06
So you're wanting to build it but first want to know if such a service already exists? ;) – Mark Mayo Jan 17 '12 at 12:14
@VMAtm: Well, I have friends all arround the world, but if had to focus the question I'll ask about Europe (in Spain there aren't services like that, but I don't know in the rest of Europe) – Ivan Jan 17 '12 at 18:10
@MarkMayo: No, thanks, fortunately I have a too much work to start a new project ;) I want to leave work, not adquire more! :-D – Ivan Jan 17 '12 at 18:12

1 Answer

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The best advice in this case for your friends would be to check the 'flights+hotel' sections of travel websites. Point is, the convenience factor of such deals is what could make them more expensive than manually putting together a holiday by booking cheapest flights and hotels separately. If you're asking for a site that does that for you - combining cheapest flights and hotels on its own - that's just not how the industry works! Kayak, for instance, routes such queries to Expedia which is essentially an online travel agent.

This also depends on where you live. Check whether your region's low cost airlines have a holidays page. In Europe, there's easyJet holidays; in Asia, there's Air Asia Go...combined with cheap airfares these can provide budget options.

What this boils down is a question of how much effort you want to put in into designing your holiday. If you don't want to hunt around, you end up paying a premium to travel agencies for figuring it out for you!

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My friends and other people I talk with don't know/like to use these websites. For them (comming from an analogic world) travels are arranged by asking someone what they want: "I want to go to Paris next week" and don't understand that computers need to specify exactly or approximately where and when do you want to go. The point is "informality". I agree your last paragraph and that's what I've find until now and my question is to try to find a site that don't sacrifice (too much) budget in order to get comfort. – Ivan Jan 17 '12 at 18:18
So I'm getting a bit confused here. Do you want a website that can understand natural language queries such as "I want to go to Paris next month between 2nd and 10th"? If that's the case then you're answer is going to be no, you'll have to talk to a real-world (human) travel agent. Natural language processing simply isn't advanced enough to understand intent that well yet. Many website holiday deal sections try to approach this by offering a compiled list of destinations without need to fill out forms, which may be the closest you can get in present day. – Ankur Banerjee♦ Jan 17 '12 at 19:54
Yes, that's what I want. I don't hope the site understand natural language, of course :) I suppose that if it exists, it will have a person behind as you say (a travel agent). – Ivan Jan 17 '12 at 23:45
all or most travel websites I know of will allow you to put in an interval and specify a desired length of stay within that interval. Of course using websites to find "the lowest price" for you is more expensive than finding it yourself as the website operators will charge for their services (often a percentage). – jwenting Jan 18 '12 at 6:59

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