Trip Planner from Yahoo! Travel is now ready for prime time. Today marks the general availability of the new service, along with cool new uses of the Yahoo! Maps AJAX API.

A little background for those of you who haven’t yet used Trip Planner: it’s a tool that simplifies the research, planning and sharing of trips online so that you can create a customized, printable take-along travel guide. It allows you to tag information found on Yahoo! Travel and the rest of the Web and bring it into one slick AJAX interface.

Ourfavorite new maps feature is the Trip Planner “explore” option where the top trip plans from thousands of destinations, as chosen by other Yahoo! users, are plotted on an interactive map using the Yahoo! Maps AJAX API. You can pan and zoom to find the trip wherever in the world that’s right for you. You can see this at: http://travel.yahoo.com/trip?action=explore.

Another neat use of the Maps AJAX API in Trip Planner is the ability to view trip items in variety of formats including plotted on Satellite, Hybrid and Street Level maps. You can also add recommendations from Yahoo! Travel Guides for nearby hotels, things to do, restaurants and other great stuff.

We hope you like what you see! Check it out and let us know what you think! You can post either here on the Trip Planner forum.

Vivek Hariharan & Mirek Grymuza
Yahoo! Travel & Yahoo! Maps