T+L's Top 28 Web Sites

Pet-Friendly Find more than 25,000 hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, campgrounds, and beaches that accommodate pets on petswelcome.com. The site allows you to make reservations online, but still advises calling the hotel to double-check its pet policies.

Photos For storing and organizing vacation photos, flickr.com is our pick. Not only does it make uploading easy, but it plugs users into a giant community of shutterbugs who share photos with one another. (Each photo is organized by subject, like "durian" or "Eiffel Tower," so it's simple to search.) The site permits you to upload 20 megabytes of photos a month free, but after that, it's $24.95 a year.

Search Aid Our favorite one-stop destination for competitive hotel and car-rental prices is Kayak, which launched last year. The site quickly searches more than 100 Web sites, including discount agents and hotels' own sites. The results page is somewhat bare-bones, but there are multiple ways to sort through listings, and clicking on each one gets you more details and booking info.

Spas The well-organized spafinder.com, with a database of 3,000 spas around the world, allows you to search by spa type, location, and more than 150 specialties and therapies, from acupressure to yoga classes. Other features include a glossary, articles, and new spa listings, updated monthly.

Theme Parks For everything from news to reviews to safety data, themeparkinsider.com has the details on nearly 70 theme and amusement parks worldwide. The reader opinions are especially useful, with ratings from 1 to 10 on attractions, restaurants, and hotels for each park.

Traffic Reports We prefer Google's maps (see "Maps"), but if you're heading off on a weekend getaway, maps.yahoo.com is the only site with live traffic, speed-limit, and construction updates, so you can avoid that tractor-trailer incident on I-95. Plus, the new interface, although still in beta testing, is fairly sleek and easy to use.

Travel Advisories If you are concerned about safety, check travel.state.gov for official travel warnings and country-by-country consular information sheets that brief travelers on everything from political news to medical facilities to road conditions.

Vacation Rentals With a hefty database of 17,000 vacation rental properties in the United States and Canada, resortquest.com just unveiled a redesigned Web site in February, which offers interactive maps, advanced search functions, and more details on each property.

Wireless Internet Access At jiwire.com, you can easily search more than 100,000 wireless hot spots—both paid and free—in 117 countries, by zip code or city. On the road?Narrow the search to hotels. You do have to scroll through a sponsored listing or two before you get the results.