Wingmap is a new visual flight search tool – you select your date for travel and then select the departure/arrival city on a simple map. It is easy to use and has benefits over standard flight search forms. You do not need to know specific airport names, when you select a city on the map, Wingmap lists the corresponding airports and you have the option to remove any from the search. Techcrunch UK spoke to the developers earlier this week and they plan the next release before the end of the year with two-way search and more comprehensive coverage of European airports. Updates that would be good include cookies (to hold details about your prospective travels preventing the need to keep entering the info), colours (a change here to move away from the current monochrome theme) and the ability to toggle city names (no need then to hover over city names if unsure about your geography).

Luggage Online have compiled a fifty strong list of the best travel sites ‘you probably have never heard of’. An impressive resource and each link contains a summary along with any strong or interesting features found on the sites. Unsurprisingly, given the continuing buzz and popularity around social communities, the first category and ten links are attributed to social travel networks. Some of the more off the wall sites include Airline Meals (with a collection of almost 20,000 images!) and Unusual Hotels of the World (over 100 hotels profiled ranging from the different to the bizarre).