In terms of vacations and places to crash, I found it easy to decide on which place to go to or which pad to crash at by checking out Google - that is if I am not familiar to the place or I don't know anyone around the area, if there are some friends or something, I'd contact them and get the best advice from people who lives in the area. Anyways, going back to google, it does have a list of places to go to (and you can be specific). Nowadays those websites already lists the things that you can do in that place and how much it would cost. Google makes life easier