An easy way to plan your next trip

Travel is an application, developed by Microsoft, for researching and planning your next trip.

If you need evidence that Windows 8 is trying to be more consumer oriented, take a look at the Travel app that’s included with the operating system. Microsoft’s focusing on the core apps in Windows 8 means that Travel is a very solid and useful app for researching and booking your next trip.

The main page of Travel features different locations around the globe that you can read up about. There is a ton of information about each location including weather, maps, history, and things to do. Travel also pulls in information for restaurants from Frommer’s Travel Guides. Unfortunately there’s no Yelp integration for user submitted reviews.

Travel isn’t only for researching as you can book a hotel or flight from the app. There is a handy flight look up tool, which will give you the prices for different flights and hotels. This is great as you don’t need need to visit another site or application to plan your trip.

The app isn’t perfect, though. There are some photos that refuse to load and while the panoramic photos are great, it only shows one perspective. It would have been nice to see some street view information from Bing integrated into Travel.

Overall, Travel is a great start for planning your trip but has a few bugs and missing features that keep it from being perfect.