For half of my 10-day trip, I intended to traipse around Panama City. The rest would be a solo adventure — but to where? Greedily, I began surfing the Web, exploring my friends’ suggestions and amassing options.

It didn’t take long for disorganization to set in. There were so many possibilities and interesting tidbits in travel articles. How would I keep it together to make a wise destination decision — or take the information I’d found with me? I could cut and paste text into a Word document or save Web pages in a bookmarks folder. But the former seemed tedious, and the latter inadequate.

Then I remembered Gliider, a browser tool that saves and organizes travel research. I downloaded the free add-on for Firefox, which deposited a small arrow icon on my browser navigation bar that, when clicked, opened a sort of file box. There I created a “trip” to Panama City, and began selecting, dragging and dropping text and photos from the Web into handy folders with labels like flights, hotels, see and do.

I could share the stash with friends and e-mail myself PDF dossiers of smartly organized information, ready to print out as a bespoke travel guide. (In January, iPhone users will be able to carry their Gliider content via an app.)

Gliider, I learned, is just one of a growing number of new online tools to help travelers plan where to go and what to do when they get there. While still immature and somewhat buggy, they are making finding, sorting, saving and organizing nuggets culled from the mountains of online travel content more efficient and fun.

GET ORGANIZED With the help of Gliider, my Panama vision soon crystallized. I decided to spend two days in Bocas del Toro on the Caribbean, then I would head over the continental divide and spend two days in Boquete, a mecca for coffee fiends.

I made Gliider trips for each destination. Local flight confirmation details went into the flights folder, lodging choices into hotels, surf-lesson information into see and do, and so on.

With a little more luck (or more common destinations), I might have gotten a price break on a hotel. Gliider queries its partner sites, Hotels.com and Travelzoo, and alerts you to deals at properties you put in hotel folders and nearby properties of the same quality. If you book a room, Gliider collects a commission. In the future, it plans to provide deals for flights, rental cars and adventure excursions specific to trips.

Two other services, TravelMuse and NileGuide, also help users organize trip information, create their own travel guides and make bookings via partners. These Web sites also have unique travel content and user-created content, which makes them especially useful for travelers who haven’t decided on destinations yet. In fact, TravelMuse has a feature called Inspire Me that provides suggestions based on the kind of trip you want — say, a romantic getaway no more than a two-hour flight from your home airport. NileGuide offers ideas by region and categories like adventure, beach, budget, family and honeymoon.

Because the sites are still building their content, they work best for people planning trips to well-worn destinations. Neither were fully prepared to help me plan my trip to Panama.

TravelMuse provided more overall flexibility because, in addition to having its own content, it lets you search the Web. The only catch is that you have to search the Web from within TravelMuse, which can feel a bit cumbersome. I also found the search results were sometimes off. For example, while looking for a restaurant in Panama City, I got some results in a city of the same name in Florida. Nevertheless, the approach enables content to be saved in a Web-based Tripfolio that you can share without having to download software.

NileGuide is a slicker site but limits users to content it creates itself and gets from partners. To test it out, I created a guide for Cairo, a city I once lived in. The hotel, restaurant and activity suggestions were good and reasonably comprehensive, with many items helpfully informed by a “local expert.” Once I’d made my own list of items, I could see them on a Google map and create a logistically sensible day-by-day itinerary for a big, gridlocked city. The site also offers 16 Cairo guides, including itineraries for lovers, budget travelers and visitors with children.

FIND FUN A spate of new sites have also cropped up that focus on helping travelers find great activities.

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