Website hopes to add retro to travel planning

Websites such as Expedia, Priceline, and TripAdvisor have put a lot of power into your hands (and put a lot of travel agents out of business). But they have also made the process more time-consuming, and you’re never quite sure that you’re seeing all of the best things to do, places to stay, or ways to get there.

A Montreal start-up called Hopper is working on that problem, with a vision of becoming the Google of travel. Beyond just searching for the cheapest flight or hotel room, Hopper wants to let you write, for example, “scuba diving in the Caribbean,’’ and find a ranking of the best islands for doing that, based on the Web’s consensus opinion. There’s also a way to book flights.

It’s closing a funding round of about $8 million, led by Cambridge-based Atlas Venture, and has been hunting for office space - and software development talent - in Cambridge. (The company will continue to operate in Montreal, as well.) Hopper earlier raised $2 million from Canada’s Brightspark Ventures.

“Travel sites are mainly good at informational stuff, like giving you airfares or hotel prices when you give them specific airport codes or cities you want to visit,’’ said Hopper founder Frederic Lalonde, a former vice president at Expedia. “We’re interested in adding inspirational stuff, like the best restaurants to try for a particular kind of food, the best places to golf in the Mediterranean, or to see the running of the bulls.’’

Lalonde said the start-up is building its own index of travel-related information.

Hopper’s demo shows how the site will work with information about Spain, and he said an international version of the site will be launched within weeks, followed by a US version.

Lalonde noted that between Kayak (Concord), ITA Software (Cambridge), Goby (Boston), and TripAdvisor (Newton), the Boston area has a strong cluster of travel-related companies. He said that at least one of Hopper’s three founders will move to Cambridge from Montreal. (The others founders are Joost Ouwerkerk and Sebastien Rainville.) They have been working on Hopper since 2007.