TripStalker will search for you

Unhappy with the prices you’re finding for airline tickets, hotels and rental cars, and willing to take a chance on waiting for a better price?

A new site, TripStalker.com, allows you to do that without forcing you to compulsively surf the Web.

While you sleep (or do the work your boss pays you to do), TripStalker is surfing for prices you’ve told it you want.

If the price for the date and place you want to visit drops at or below the price you’ve set as your goal, TripStalker will alert you by e-mail, text message or desktop pop-up. No obligation, just information.

TripStalker is entering some hot competition for the airfare portion of its stalking.

Orbitz.com’s Deal Detector for airfares has most of the same features as TripStalker. Both allow you to be somewhat picky: You can choose to be alerted only to price drops on a specific airline, or only for nonstop flights.

Orbitz has a nifty feature TripStalker doesn’t have: In addition to asking for fare alerts for a given travel day, you can also ask to be alerted if fares drop for three travel days before or after your first choice of dates.

Travelocity.com’s Fare Watcher feature is less discriminating and notifies you about price drops over a long time frame – you can’t tell it to alert you to a desired price for a specific day. That works best if you’re extremely flexible.

TripStalker’s main advantages over the other two: You don’t have to plow through the site trying to find the trip-stalking feature.

And given that you can be alerted to deals for hotel rooms and cars, you get a full-service stalk.