Today, most would-be travelers start their journeys online by researching destinations, carrier schedules, accommodations and free web mapping services.

In order to compete with travel agencies and agents, travel information publishers, who traditionally published books, magazines and newsletters, have migrated to the Internet and become online publishers. Some have created retail websites whose primary objective is to sell traditional hard-copy books. Others are focused on publishing travel reviews on their sites, and derive revenue from advertising and affiliate links.

Still others, such as Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Priceline, are Internet travel agencies that place a high value on creating comparisons of prices and schedules. We chose not to review them as part of the top ten because they are retail websites, not media websites.

We make this distinction: The primary goal of a media website is to inform; the primary goal of a retail website is to sell. Similarly, if we were reviewing literature websites, we would not include Amazon.com, which is a retail website whose primary goal is to sell books, not review them.

We did an in-depth examination of 10 most popular travel information websites and evaluated them against 14 criteria—our famous Mequoda website design guidelines. Of the 10 websites, none was perfect, but most were very good and two or three were excellent.

International Living came in as #3, and we'll tell you why.