Social Media Sites to Use for Your Travel Plans

A new category of social media web sites is devoted to connecting travelers to their friends, according to NBC News. For travelers, especially those traveling alone, the web sites help them save money, remain safe and enjoy more authentic cultural experiences.

The web sites that began the trend include Couchsurfing, Airbnb and Planely. There have since been a multitude of new sites dedicated to travel and social media.

Among these new wen sites is Easynest, a site that aims to help like-minded travelers meet and split the cost of a hotel room. It helps solo travelers avoid a single supplement. The site promotes itself as Airbnb for hotels and resorts. The site connects to your Facebook account, and you make a profile with a description of yourself. Users are also encouraged to add links to their external social networks.

It's a new site so it doesn't always return results. There is also an obvious danger factor in sharing a hotel room with a stranger.

Another new site is Friends of Friends Travel, a social network aimed at travelers between 18 and 35. It lets members share accommodations, luggage lockers, travel tips or just a cup of coffee in a foreign city with friends as well as friends of friends. The site aims to help travelers meet new people, save money and have a more intimate or authentic experience in a city.

It has a safety factor that doesn't exist with Easynest, because it's limited to friends and friends of friends.

"By purposefully limiting your connection to friends and friends of friends only you get the best of both worlds: the reliability of friends, and the excitement of meeting someone new," the founders write on their web site.

A new Facebook app, Tint, uses your Facebook friends to connect you to friends of friends to help users find someone to host them in a foreign city, show them around or share a meal. However, the friends of friends have to have signed up for the app for it to be useful, though it has potential to be very useful.