TripTouch is nice travel mashup site that offers everything from trip planning tools like hotel and flight booking, as well as reviews and photos from fellow travelers, to a free blog and other ways to document your trips.
There are a number of other players in this field — we've looked at Trippert and RealTravel in the past — but TripTouch strikes a nice balance between custom features and outside mashups. For instance all the mapping elements are handled by Google Maps, while the booking tools come in the form of Kayak widgets.
But TripTouch has its own tools as well, like the excellent “local info” section. When you land on TripTouch the site sniffs your IP address to give you some local information about your hometown — things to do, things to see, upcoming events etc.
Then when you're browsing trip destinations you can see the same information for where ever you're headed. Some of the data is pulled from Eventful and some of it seems to generated on site — how thorough the coverage is depends on how popular your destination is.
Obviously not every destination is going to provide all the info you want, but I had pretty good luck for the U.S. and Europe and even found some interesting tidbits for my upcoming trip to Nicaragua.
Travel sites are a dime a dozen and it takes a bit to stand out from the crowd, but, thanks to the judicious use of widgets and external data mashups, TripTouch does. [A word of caution, some pages on TripTouch didn't play well with Firefox 3 beta 3, but I no problems with other browsers.]
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