Vacation rentals sites like HomeAway and Airbnb offer an often value-packed alternative to hotel accommodations, particularly in desirable destinations or during high seasons. The downside is that travelers have found themselves at the pricing mercy of property owners—until now. Thanks to a new feature from booking site iStopOver called Wise Ask!, travelers can now bid for lodging.

Here's how it works: After a quick registration, users punch in their desired city from a list of 15, their dates, and some details about their stay, including budget and desired neighborhood. The request then zips off to iStopOver's "hosts," or property listers, who can then decide whether they'll accept a particular bid. From there, guests can finalize the booking. Think of it as blind booking for vacation rentals.

One obvious downside to the feature are iStopOver's limited Wise Ask! listings: many of those 15 available cities are in New Zealand, a lovely but admittedly far-off destination for U.S. travelers. Still, if your summer travel plans include, for example, London, New York, Paris, or San Francisco, a smart Wise Ask! bid or two may be an effective way to lower the cost of your vacation rental.

Launched on March 15, a new travel website, Next Great Place, matches people with offline travel experts who provide custom itineraries. Here’s how it works: go online to register, then complete a series of questions about what you’re looking for in your vacation, including the number and age of travelers on your trip, the resort amenities and activities you hope to find, and your budget. Just 48 hours after submitting your information, a travel planner will respond with three custom itineraries. Choose one and voilà: Next Great Place makes a reservation, and your planning is over.

There is, however, one small caveat: like the travel planners, you only have 48 hours to pick your trip after you receive the custom itineraries. That way, says co-founder Tom Filippini, resort suppliers don’t have to hold their rooms too long. “We put a time-frame around the vacation planning process, which we think is great for the supplier and the traveler,” he says.

The website takes the middle ground between booking through a travel agent and researching online solo. Travel planners at Next Great Place vet all of the destination resorts, running them through a 350-criteria checklist. You’ll also find great deals on the site, says Filippini, since destination partners give the company preferential pricing in order to compete for your business.

Before Next Great Place, Filippini and website co-founder Erik Mitisek both worked for Exclusive Resorts, a luxury destination club that charges membership fees starting at $100,000 in return for access to hundreds of properties around the world. “When it comes to booking luxury travel outside the confines of a vacation club or a destination club, the Internet becomes pretty cumbersome and overwhelming,” says Filippini.

Though it’s cheaper than membership in a luxury destination club, Next Great Place still comes at a price. The site’s services are free until July, but after that travelers will have to pay a modest fee: $9 to request a vacation and receive three custom itineraries, plus $30 more to also talk through the options and receive more options from the travel planners. Eventually, the site will charge a premium subscription, probably less than $500.

For now, destination choices are limited to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico; Vail, Colorado; and a selection of guest ranches in the western United States. With plans to add a new destination every four weeks, Filippini and Mitisek hope to have 60 destinations and “experience verticals” like safaris and wine tours by 2015.

Keeping up with work can be tough during travel, especially if you don't want to lug around a computer. Now, Motorola is making it easier than ever to stay plugged-in on the go, with a high-end Android phone that claims to "put the power of a PC in your pocket."

Sleek, black and insanely fast, the Atrix 4G comes with an accessory called the Lapdock, a lightweight laptop shell that looks a lot like a MacBook Air, but lacks the processor, memory or storage space to do anything on its own. Instead, the Atrix 4G phone serves as its brain: snap the phone into a socket in the back, and after about 10 seconds the Lapdock comes to life, showcasing your phone's content and a Firefox browser on its 11.6-inch screen. Send an e-mail, surf the web, and type a word document with the QuickOffice program. Or pull up the Atrix dialer on the Lapdock screen and make a phone call, kind of like traditional laptops do with Skype. When you're done working, just pull out the phone and the Lapdock screen shuts off instantly.

The product, which debuted earlier this winter at the Consumer Electronics Show, is good news for travelers. No matter where you are, your laptop will always have Internet, since it taps into your phone's 4G connection. And at just 2.4 pounds, the sturdy Lapdock shell is easy to stow in a small carry-on bag.

Even on its own, the Atrix 4G may be worth a look. It has much more horsepower than an average phone, including 1 gigabyte of RAM, 16 gigs of internal memory and a powerful dual-core processor. In addition to normal Android features, it also has a biometric fingerprint reader in the power button, so users can unlock and power the phone with a swipe of the finger.

Some other fun perks? Power without the power cord, for starters. The Lapdock acts like a giant battery, charging the phone as long as it's connected. Better yet, it boasts a seven-hour battery life, perfect for a long flight. Forget the days of touching down at your destination with a drained phone.

Though it's a fun idea, the Atrix 4G package does have some drawbacks. The Lapdock's Internet speed is a little slow, especially if you can't connect to a 4G network, technology that is to date far from ubiquitous. The screen resolution is lower than most normal laptops, and the touchpad can be awkward to use. The biggest problem, however, is the $500 price tag for the phone and Lapdock together: for half a grand, you could also buy a netbook, an iPad or a mini laptop. But the Atrix is an interesting new take on the smartphone, and travelers should be on the lookout to see how the idea develops.

CES, the annual tech-a-palooza that overruns Las Vegas every January, started in full force yesterday, with some 140,000 attendees and more than 20,000 brand-new gadgets, appliances, software, hardware, and some seriously pimped out cars (hello, Audi's e-tron Spyder!). Always on the search for the latest, greatest tech toys to bring traveling, I found plenty of winners. Here, a few of my favorites so far.

1. Lady Gaga, Polaroid's improbable new creative director, made a brief appearance yesterday to unveil three new products: a pair of photo-taking sunglasses, a modern-take on the old-school Polaroid camera, and, best of all, a small and wireless instant printer, which will work with most any camera or smart phone, save the iPhone, all of which Gaga helped conceive. "Thanks for not treating me like a spokesperson," she said to Polaroid's executives, "And for letting me design this shit myself."
2. Canon's Vixia camcorder. It's small, light, offers amazing image quality—and an underwater casing that lets you take it 130 feet below water.
3. Samsung's ultra-slim notebook, which should be in stores in February.
4. Casio's GPS-enabled camera with fully functioning maps that tell you major sights nearby.
5. Kodak's Easyshare mini-cameras, which are just a shade wider than a business card.

Now, even if you lose your mobile connection, you can rely on fast, dynamic maps when you need them—as long as you're using Android. Google's newest maps release proactively caches large areas of location data based on where you use maps the most, meaning detailed street maps are available even when you're not connected. Genius stuff!

Additionally, Maps Navigation (Beta)—the free GPS navigation feature—is beefing up, introducing offline rerouting. It still requires a connection to start the route, but if you miss a turn and see your signal drop, you'll still be able to get back on track. (Google will be rolling out that feature over the coming weeks.)

Also new are stepped-up vector graphics that offer 3D views. Tilt while zoomed in one of the 100+ cities with 3D buildings to see a skyline and then rotate around the 3D buildings to get a new perspective. To activate, center the map on your location, and then hit the compass button in the top right corner.

I'm not a big user of social-networking services, but I was almost tempted to join Foursquare when a colleague mentioned that she used it primarily to remember where she'd been on a trip. But Foursquare still requires you to "check in." Now, you can get the same effect and more with Google's free Latitude app, just released today in the iTunes app store after a nearly-two-year delay. The application (also available for Android) will track your location on a map, even in the background when the app isn't running. You can save that info or let friends see it, and you can see approved friends' locations too.

It sounds basic, but it's an incredibly powerful travel tool. Now, when I go out wandering in a new city, I can just turn on Latitude and later call up a track of where I've been. And if I'm traveling with friends, there's no more endless texting trying to meet up: Just briefly turn on Latitude and share your location with each other. I can also see this being useful when my wife is lost somewhere—I'll be able to easily pull up her exact location and guide her where she needs to go.

The app was initially rejected by Apple, who said it was concerned people would get confused between it and the built-in maps, but, as it recently did with Google Voice, the company reversed course without any real explanation. (Android's creeping market share may have something to do with it.) Of course like all tracking tech, this has the potential to be abused—maybe don't give tracking permission to that boyfriend you're about to dump—and those skeptical of privacy promises from big companies like Google might want to think twice. Used sparingly, though, apps like this have the potential to change travel the way GPS did 10 years ago by giving us even more freedom to simply explore, never worrying about getting lost, or losing each other.

Last month, Delta announced it would shell out big money to improve the dining options at the airline's otherwise lamentable JFK Terminal 3 in New York. Part of the plan? "Allow[ing] customers to order meals directly from Apple iPad kiosks stationed near their departure gates, with delivery guaranteed within 10 minutes."

On Friday, we happened past Bar Brace, the Italian cafe from New York restaurateur Jason Denton (Inoteca, 'Ino) that we hope becomes the future of airport dining. Sure, there's the undeniable cool factor of ordering a panino via iPad. But with plentiful seating for solo diners, copious power plugs of both the 110 V and USB variety, and an Enomatic system to keep wine by the glass fresh, expect Bar Brace to become the place to wait out a JFK weather delay this winter.

Travel inspiration site Wanderfly, which promises to send you to "places you've never heard of, but are exactly what you're looking for," has just inked a deal with Kayak, the airfare search engine. The partnership makes the site that much more useful by providing what should be the very best possible fares for your trip.

But let's back up: What does Wanderfly do exactly? Rather than punching in a destination you've already decided on at travel search sites like Kayak, Expedia, or Priceline, Wanderfly simply asks a few questions about your time frame, budget, and interests—and then kicks back a suggested destination city. Rounding out the destination idea? A gift-wrapped air-and-hotel itinerary with tips on where to eat and what to see once you're there, drawn from two dozen partners like Foursquare, Jauntsetter, Lonely Planet, and Rough Guides.

The total cost of your trip is tallied up as you adjust flight and hotel details, and with Kayak on board, it's almost a sure thing you're getting the best possible price on airfare, leaving more cash for a swish hotel. We say almost because Southwest Airlines doesn't share its prices with other websites and could be your cheapest option on a particular trip. As always on the web, it pays to shop around.

That said, Wanderfly manages to inject a sense of exploration so often missing in today's world of dreary-if-utilitarian travel search options. You really don't know what destination might come back when you punch the "Get Going" button, and that's undeniably a little thrill. Besides, combining air, hotel and stuff to do in one wanderlust-inspiring package? We love the idea.

Anymore the whole Black Friday/Cyber Monday thing sort of blurs together as stores tend to run deals all weekend long, but that doesn't mean you can't still find some great deals today. Here are my favorite bargains for the travelers on your list—or just for yourself.

Kindle 2: $89
This one is so far just a rumor, but it's being widely reported that as of 9 am PST today, Amazon will sell out its stock of Kindle 2s for $89. It has always-on connectivity for buying books, and while the newer one has slightly better contrast, this is a great way to dip into the e-reader world for $100 less than the current model. But move fast: The same deal on Friday sold out in seconds. If you miss that one, check out the refurbished first-gen Nook at Buy.com for $99.

AT&T Prepaid Phone: $30
This Pantech isn't an iPhone, but if, say, you're a Verizon subscriber (which means your phones won't work in most countries overseas), pick up one of these just to take with you on trips. Just buy a local prepaid SIM card (widely available in most countries) when you arrive. If you travel a lot and want a much nicer option, check out this unlocked Nokia X6 from Amazon with all the bells and whistles.

4GB USB drive: $5
They ain't sexy, but flash drives are invaluable on the road, both to carry must-have files as well as your own software (check out these 10 tricks). This is the cheapest per-gigabyte price I've seen and Newegg is a great online retailer.

Canon EOS Rebel T2i bundle: $850
If you're looking to upgrade your photographic life all at once, this is an amazing deal from Amazon that includes the 18-megapixel T2i DSLR, a telephoto lens, a memory card, and a pro-quality printer for several hundred dollars less than if purchased individually. Looking for something cheaper? Check out this Casio Exilim—with 12 megapixels and HD video for just $70.

Garmin nüvi 255WT: $99
If you haven't yet upgraded to a smartphone that supports navigation, there are some great deals on standalone GPS units, like this Garmin, which features a wide screen and free lifetime traffic info. You'll see some cheaper options out there this season, but if it's not a TomTom or a Garmin, keep shopping.

Reprising last year's helpful holiday gift of free Wi-Fi, Google has teamed up with AirTran, Delta, and Virgin America to offer free Gogo In-flight Wi-Fi from November 20 through January 2. The one small catch? You have to use the search company's browser, Chrome, to log on for free. Not too onerous for free in-flight entertainment at a time of year when flying can be particularly miserable!