So you’re a college student, and you need to get out of town.  Maybe you’d like to get home for Thanksgiving, or perhaps you want to do Spring Break with some friends.  What information and tools do you need to make your arrangements quickly and cheaply?

We asked our friends and classmates this question.  Based on their responses, we compiled a list of everything a student needs in order to make optimal plans.  It’s actually pretty simple:

• Academic information:   Know when you’re off from school, and when you need to be back on campus.
• Social information:  Know where your friends are going, which friends have been to your destination, and who else will be there too.
• Booking tool: Access to the largest inventory of flights and hotels at the lowest prices.  And how about cab- and ride-sharing features to lower the personal and environmental costs of holiday travel?
• Management tool: A central place to store bookings, and to track and share personal travels.

There are a lot of travel sites out there (ok…too many), and several of them are good for booking or managing travel.  Kayak.com is an obvious example of the former; TripIt.com of the latter.  And if you want to plan out your travels hour-by-hour, picking restaurants and hotels and museums and parks to visit weeks in advance of your trip, leaving nothing to chance and eliminating all spontaneity…if you have that kind of time and taste, there are sites for that too (see travelmuse.com).

But for students especially, these tools need to be driven by social and academic information.  No website gathers that information and presents it in a useful way.  And as for the booking and management tools already in use, most of them are overly-developed and needlessly complex.

All that’s about to change.   It’s coming soon:  gtrot.com.