If you are really particular about how you travel and where you stay - not just which airline and/or class or which hotel brand, but to exactly pick out where you want to sit and where you want to  sleep, check out these websites.

Seatguru  launched in 2001 by frequent flyer Matthew Daimler - He started with a single color-coded interactive airplane seating chart. Having experienced firsthand the vast differences between airline seats, he was determined to collect this useful information and share it with other travelers. Now seatguru.com covers more than 300 airplane seatmaps from more than 45 different airlines and was purchased by Trip Advisor in 2007.

Seat 61 is not strictly comparable but a unique site dedicated to train travel around the world - if you want to know something about trains in Inner Mongolia to the palace on wheels in India, this is your ultimate resource.

Tripkick - and now tripkick.com promises to do for the hotel industry what seatguru.com has done for airlines - early days yet with the site covering some US regions, but it has every chance of taking off.