Before you book flights you need to know where to go, and when. Fortunately though, gone are the days of having to sit in your high street travel agents for hours and rely upon a real life, biological employee to give you a hand full of options to pick from based upon their cursory search.

Instead, thanks to the power of the internet,we can now search for ourselves. Yep, we can spend even more hours trying to do it on our own. But although this gives us more options, it takes a lot of digging to uncover them all.

Thankfully, now there is an even newer way. Over the last few years companies have started to recognise what a bind all this digging is and have subsequently designed all sorts of funky internet software to take the pain out of the planning.

By using a few internet tools and a bit of swift clicking we can quickly build an itinerary to suit our budget - if we are flexible we can get cheaper deals, but even if we are not, they can still give us a much better idea of the budget we are going to need - and we've listed a few of our favourites below.

These tools are tailor made for the vague-abond - the individual with a rather hazy notion of the area they wish to visit but a crystal clear knowledge of their budget constraints. They help you budget, they help you plan, they ensure you spend less time in internet cafe/travel agents and more time on the beach.