The future of online travel booking?

USA Today just published an overview of some young travel planning and booking sites that have really come into their own this year. It’s a great reference if you’re among the travelers who tend to plan and book online but don’t have time to keep up on the good, the bad, and the ugly of new travel sites.

On the list, you’ll find a number of sites which deliver a combination of traveler reviews and booking options (Boo, VibeAgent), as well as sites that help you organize all the bits and pieces of your trip into a single, easy-to-reference document (Yapta, TripIt).

During 2007, SmarterTravel.com editors reviewed many of the sites on the list, but the USA Today article is handy as a simplified version of the information in one place.

If you do want more than a sentence or two about each website, though, check our reviews of a number of the sites included in USA Today’s list, plus others.

• Boo.com
• EuroCheapo booking search
• Farecast (and Farecast’s deal coverage)
• Kayak’s weekend airfare search tool
• MelodyTrip
• OrbitzTLC Traveler Update
• Travelocity’s RoadTrip Wizard
• Travelocity’s FareWatcher Plus
• TripAdvisor’s Traveler Network
• TripIt
• Vayama
• Yahoo! Travel
• Yapta

Plus,

• Ed Perkins on cFares and Vayama
• Ed Perkins on Farecast

(Editor’s Note: SmarterTravel.com is published by Smarter Travel Media LLC, a member of the TripAdvisor Media Network.)