From easy-to-use hotel booking tools to smart ways to share and edit your photos, these are the best travel websites and apps out there.

(mTrip)

Appeared as "Top Travel Apps and Websites" in T+L Magazine

As anyone who’s ever tried to wade through page after page of listings in the travel section of Apple’s App Store can attest, the digital landscape for travelers is both excitingly and bewilderingly expansive. In less than 17 years, we’ve gone from being able to book an airline ticket online to telling a Shanghai cabdriver the address of our hotel in perfect Mandarin via a smart-phone app. Now the question isn’t: What travel websites and apps are available? Rather, it’s: Which ones are essential? That’s where T+L comes in. We’ve spent the past few months road testing hundreds of travel sites, apps, and services both new and established—sometimes getting exactly what we needed (such as, say, that corner room with the great view) and other times finding ourselves high and dry in the dreaded last-row middle seat. Here, our picks of the travel sites and apps that will change the way you travel for the better.

Get an Instant Itinerary: mTrip

(mTrip)

Click Factor: If you’re traveling to Amsterdam, Chicago, Prague, Vienna, or any of the 28 global cities covered by mTrip, all you have to do is input your travel dates and lodging and what you want to see and do, and the service will instantly calculate a daily, location-appropriate itinerary, complete with reviews, directions, and distances from your hotel. (Each city has its own app for $5.99.) Or just explore your destination with the service’s augmented-reality app, which uses your smartphone’s camera.

Drawback: Reviews of some venues can be scant.

Runners-Up: Michelin, Zagat

(Android, iPhone)

Tip Properly: GlobeTipping

(GlobeTipping)

Click Factor: Do you know how much to give a hotel porter in Tuvalu or a waiter in Bermuda? Don’t worry: it’s optional, according to this app’s tipping advice for more than 200 countries, from Afghanistan to Zambia, which make it the most comprehensive of the global tip calculators. Speaking of which, the app includes one, which will factor in tips by percentage and divide the overall bill by number of diners.

Drawback: Specific information for different types of services—housekeeping, spas, taxis, and the like—is uneven.

(iPhone)

Know When to Buy: Bing

(Bing)

Click Factor: When it comes to fare predictions, Bing’s travel section is unbeatable, using algorithms and historical data to determine whether an airfare will go up or down—and whether you should wait or jump on that ticket before it’s too late.

Drawback: There’s no dedicated Bing travel smart-phone app—and travel is curiously missing from Bing’s stunning iPad app.

Runners-Up: FareReport.com, Yapta.com

(iPhone)

Pick the Best Airplane Seat: SeatGuru

(SeatGuru)

Click Factor: Never be trapped in a last-row, non-reclining middle seat on a flight with no Wi-Fi again. Enter an airline and flight number and SeatGuru calls up a detailed airplane plan, indicating seats that are desirable (emergency exits, those with extra legroom, etc.), average, and simply bad (reduced legroom or recline). It also has reviews of different airline services, as well as quick-scan icons for such in-flight amenities as food, entertainment, in-seat power ports, and Wi-Fi.

Drawback: For accurate results, you have to know the exact departure and arrival times, since airlines tend to swap out planes depending on the time of year.

Runners-Up: SeatMaestro.com, SeatPlans.com

Plan Your Trip: Kayak

(Kayak)

Click Factor: Kayak’s website has become a one-stop shop for everything travel. You can use it to search for airfares and hotel rates, get fare alerts and map real-time deals, and—our new favorite function—manage itineraries with My Trips (just forward flight, hotel, and other travel confirmations to Kayak and they’ll load onto a customized online itinerary). The apps let you search and book on the fly, access information on airports and airline fees, and receive price and fare tracker alerts.

T+L Tip: If your travel plans are flexible, try the Buzz feature on the app, which gives you the best fares for a particular month on a specific route.

Runners-Up: Mobissimo, Travelocity

(Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, and Windows Phone 7)

Search for Flights and Hotel Rooms (Without the Agony): Hipmunk

(Hipmunk)

Click Factor: Hipmunk’s intuitive, color-coded bar charts make it easy to scan flights by cost, carrier, length of flight, and itinerary. Results can be filtered by the usual categories (price, number of stops, etc.) and also by “Agony,” which factors in flight length, number of stops, and price. Hipmunk’s site offers a similar approach for finding hotel rooms, delivering results in filterable Google Maps.

Runner-Up: InsideTrip.com

(iPhone, iPad)

Look for Flights in Europe: Momondo

(Momondo)

Click Factor: Momondo scours more than 800 sites including Opodo, Thomas Cook, discount airlines like Ryanair and EasyJet, and even high-speed rail networks like the TGV, and delivers the results in an attractive, multicolored design with innovative filtering options. The new iPhone app searches just as many sources for flights, and lets you scroll through different suppliers with the swipe of your finger.

Drawback: Results for domestic flights in the U.S. are hit or miss.

Runners-Up: Dohop.com, SkyScanner.com

(iPhone/iPad)

Make the Most of Your Miles: MileBlaster

(MileBlaster)

Click Factor: This Web-based service, which is optimized for mobile phones, is by far the easiest and most comprehensive way to keep track of all your frequent-flier programs (including elite ones) and make sure you use your miles before they expire. For a one-time app fee of $5.99, you also get up-to-date listings, by program, of current bonus offers, plus a trip calculator, so you can see exactly how many miles you’ll earn.

Runners-Up: Traxo.com, WebFlyer.com

(Android, Nokia, iPhone/iPad)

To see the rest of the best travel websites and apps, visit Travel + Leisure.com.