New search engine Fareness helps you figure out where to travel and when to go

Let's be honest: sometimes you just want to travel, and you don't really care where you go. You know, you're tight on cash during a New York winter and you know you must get to a tropical locale – any tropical locale – for as little money as possible. Or you want to do something cool and adventurous but you're not exactly sure what. For situations like these, new search engine Fareness.com exists. It'll help you make travel-related decisions AND book your trip on the cheap.

With Fareness, which launched last week, you can search trip options from any home-base using search terms like "Europe" or "beach" over a range of time—say September, October, November, December or all of the above—for a given number of days. The site crunches 250 million daily flight options, and then quickly spits out the best deals available that fit your desires, arranging them in a totally manageable photo-centric format.

Fareness's site asks:

"How can consumers know when and where to travel if there is no way to compare the vast differences in airfares between departure dates, trip lengths, and destinations, without running hundreds of searches?"

I think this is a pretty fair, er—fare?—point. Sometimes you just need to get away, and it'd be kind of exciting to go to whatever city or country has a great spur-of-the-moment flight deal.

In my experience testing out the site, I searched flights from New York to "European destinations" for an imaginary eight-day trip in September, October or November. Fareness turned up the cheapest flights to 11 destinations that could be sorted by "Price," "Soonest" and "Popular from JFK" (my airport of origin). The best deal resulting from that search was a $640 round-trip ticket to Copenhagen departing on September 2. Pretty good, I'd say.

Clicking on the Copenhagen trip took me to an airfare calendar where I could fiddle with the dates to see all the price options. It also had an airfare map, with pins alerting me to the prices of tickets to other nearby destinations.

To actually book the flights, Fareness leads you to Cheapoair or Priceline—so far the only two booking platforms incorporated. It's at this point that you find out about which airlines will be taking you, etcetera.

Fareness also offers a hotel booking engine, though its reach was limited at the time of writing. It only offered five options for Copenhagen, for example, including the Hilton Copenhagen Airport and Marriott Copenhagen. (And we all know Marriott really really wants you to book directly.)

While the site is fun and helpful for trip dreaming and scheming, some of its pre-organized destination categories could use broadening. The Outdoors category, for example, only featured five destinations at time of writing, and one of them was Las Vegas, where I'm pretty sure most people are more interested in indoor activities. Unless pool parties qualify.