Guidebooks and travel magazines are helpful when trying to choose hotels, excursions, or a destination for your next vacation. Travel agents are even better. But what could be less biased and more helpful than no-holds-barred, word-of-mouth comments and comparisons of trips made by other travelers just like you. This is the idea behind MyTripReport.com, a web site devoted to consumer reviews - called "trip reports ? - that provides these honest assessments for destinations all over the globe, sometimes with dozens of reviews for a single hotel or destination.

At MyTripReport.com members post their trip reports in three easy steps, and can even include photos of their trip within their report. The site is simple, uncluttered and very easy to navigate. Members can then send their family a link to their report and share their vacation and photos easily with their loved ones, friends, and even with strangers on message boards and within newsgroups. And trip reports are just as easy to locate; searching can be done by destination, resort, vacation theme, cruise ship, or by member name.

MyTripReport.com also includes a photo gallery of many destinations, including photos of many Caribbean resorts. A number of travel tools are also available on the site, including Government travel advisories, currency converters, airline seating maps, plus many more.

Word-of-mouth is such an invaluable tool available to us, it's nice not to be totally dependant on squeaky-clean hotel websites and travel brochures.