Perhaps the one element of the pre-trip service that is so important but so many travel websites struggle to get right is around weather information.
Step forward IsItSunshine, a wonderfully simple and easy-to-use website that streams weather data from around the world onto a Google Map.
Users select a location and weather results are displayed on a toolbar at the bottom of the site - weather symbols are also positioned over the location on the map.
The data can be toggled to include information for the following ten days covering wind, temperature, cloudiness, pressure, precipitation and humidity.
The site is so unobtrusive and non-commercial that it is difficult to work out who created it and where the weather data is coming from, although CultureSlurp says a Swedish developer Magnus Ottosson is the man behind the site.
Ottosson has made the Google Map and weather symbols element of the service also available via embedded code.
Weather from isitsunshine.com
UPDATE:
Ottosson responds to an email.
The site is a global version of a Swedish system he put together using free data from a Norwegian service called YR.no.
IsItSunshine looks at the language of the browser and translates search queries and results into the correct dialect. Ottosson says he has invested 500 hours into the project so far and it is still only a hobby.
There will be an iPhone app version "before the summer is over", he says.