How to plan your next holiday

After I published a post on my personal blog about the lack of decent tools on the web to help plan a holiday a friend pointed me in the direction of Opodo's new AirTools service.

It's not quite the complete answer but it's certainly heading in the right direction.

Within a very short time of playing with the five different tools available I found myself hooked on the EscapeMap feature.

Simply enter your starting destination and a broad idea of where and when you want to go and up pops a Google Map with details of destinations and cheapest available price.

Clicking on a destination provides further details of the cheapest deal with the option to click through and further specify your travel to that destination.

Further filters above the map let me decide what type of holiday I'm after (beach, shopping, history?) and further specify location and price.

The other tools on offer, CombiFlight, CheckFlight, MyAirline and FlexiFlight are all attempts at providing a more distinctive online travel service but don't really go far enough in my opinion and don't feel very different to the websites I'm used to.

EscapeMap is not perfect, it still requires quite a lot of time and effort to assess what my options are and doesn't really provide the answer to my original question, "is it not possible for me to ask for some holiday suggestions departing from Airport X on date Y, returning on date Z, and to view a list of destination options?"

It is a step in the right direction though, and a great, simple and effective use of mapping tools on the web... more please.