Planning an overseas holiday brings out high levels of excitement and anticipation in most people, however it can also be a hugely time-consuming and often frustrating task.

For a lot of people, having a largely enjoyable holiday means it needs to be relaxing, cost-effective, organised and fun-filled. In order to achieve this, it is advised that your holiday involves a degree of planning and arranging. You can do this on your own, or with the assistance of a travel guide.

For those people that do like to fly solo when it comes to planning their holidays, using the internet is the ultimate resource point. Whether it is a bed and breakfast directory for your accommodation needs, a regional website for events and activities, or an online guide to local transport, everything you need is at the touch of your mouse and keyboard.

Accommodation directories are particularly popular, with hotels, motels, farm stay, cottage, boutique inn, lodges, backpackers and bed and breakfasts all to choose from. If you look online for "bed and breakfast Queenstown" for example, you will often get at least two or three directories pop up on the first page of the Google Search results. In these directories you’d expect to find a variety of accommodation options for Queenstown, including images of them, directions, ratings, pricing as well as contact details (ie. website address).

If it is a bed and breakfast directory you’re looking for, you’ll often see that they have a short cut tool that allows you the option to simplify your searches to things like "location", "price rate" and "number of guests". This makes your search process so much quicker and easier.

The advantage of an accommodation directory is that you get all of the options available in one area thrown at you on one page or several. This is much less time-consuming than clicking on and off individual accommodation websites.

Some directories will also have a map of an entire country on the homepage, from which you can click a specific region. That will then take you to a map of all of the possible types of accommodation that are available in that region. Google Maps makes this process incredibly simple. On a bed and breakfast directory you can click on the specific accommodation establishment, which will then provide you with a comprehensive description of what that business has to offer. If need be you can then click on the link that goes to the business’s website.