Last week the TimesOnline wrote an article titled “Best Websites for Holiday Inspiration”. Sounded cool. The problem was none of the websites were really in the “Inspiration” category (at least in my opinion). I don’t mean that as a knock against these sites, actually I’m a fan of some of them, but there is a difference between travel inspiration and travel planning websites. Tim Hughes has a nice post on the subject. Give it a read, including the comments section.

Of course there is overlap, but I can place all travel sites in one of these 4 categories:

Inspiration > Research/Planning > Booking > Reflection

Joobili and other inspiration sites help you decide where to go and to a lesser extent, what to do. If you already have a destination in mind move to step 2 research/planning where you will discover hundreds of fantastic sites like most of the recommendations in the Times article.

Why does travel website categorization matter?  It doesn’t. But who says we always have to talk about things that matter.