Internet picks and pans

The wild, woolly World Wide Web: It can be a wonderful tool for researching destinations and planning trips -- or a time-wasting source of frustration. With the help of the Travel staff, I’ve compiled this list of our Internet picks as well as a few pans:

Airlines

Picks: Hats off this year to European budget airlines such as EasyJet (www.easyjet.com), Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) and revamped British Midland Airways (www.flybmi.com). Because of these companies’ low operational costs and reliance on booking flights primarily on the Internet, the cost of intra-European airfares has decreased. These airlines’ websites also have put pricing pressure on other forms of travel within Europe, including trains, some of which recently lowered fares. These airline websites allow Americans to share in the savings that Europeans enjoy.

Pans: Some popular European websites -- including British Airways (www.britishairways.com) and Opodo (www.opodo.co.uk), an Orbitz-like reservations site partly owned by nine European airlines -- make it impossible for Americans to book flights within Europe. We tried to book a trip in March between London and Malaga, Spain, on the British Airways site, but it would allow us to buy tickets only for flights that were originating in the U.S. Opodo allowed only travelers living in Britain to book flights but didn’t tell us of the requirement until well into the booking process.

Pick: We have had good experiences with www.cheapseats.com. We purchased a round-trip ticket from Los Angeles to London last year for about $330.

Pick: For airline sites, can it get any easier than JetBlue (www.jetblue.com) or Southwest (www.southwest.com)? We love them for simple search processes and clear fare displays.

The Big Three

More than $3 of every $5 spent on travel online last year went through Expedia, Orbitz or Travelocity.

Pick: Orbitz (www.orbitz.com) has done a terrific job this year in helping consumers make smart choices about airfares with the addition of FlexSearch. It allows users to look for the least expensive flights over a range of dates, and it displays results nicely in a chart. Another feature, DealDetector, continually tracks fares and sends an e-mail alert when the price to one of your chosen destinations drops to your target price.

Pan: We’re not at all fond of Expedia’s (www.expedia.com) aggressive “would-you-like-fries with-that” approach to offering add-ons to your trip. While trying to book a simple plane ticket to New York, we were forced to scroll through five pages of add-on options, including dinner at “21,” a visit to Madame Tussaud’s wax museum and a Brooklyn city tour.

Pan: We ding Travelocity (www.travelocity.com) and its Fare Watcher feature for luring us with low air fares that are frequently not available. We see a great fare, get excited, then find out that if we don’t guess exactly the right itinerary, the fare is not available.

Lodging

Pick: We still like www.sidestep.com, a site that provides a free download of a deal-search program. The application pops up on your browser window and runs simultaneously as you are, say, searching for a hotel room on Expedia. Sidestep helped us snare a $99-a-night room last year at the Le Meridien Russell Square in London. The program can help with plane tickets and car rentals too.

Pan: Despite big promises from Travelweb (www.travelweb.com), we were disappointed with the hotel booking site, whose owners include the Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, InterContinental and Starwood hotel groups. Relaunched with great fanfare last year, the site added few features not already available on other websites. In several tests, Travelweb returned room rates that were 10% or more higher than what was available from the competition, even on its specially negotiated “i-DEAL” prices.

Trip planning

Pick: One of our favorite planning tools is www.weather.com. With its forecasts and monthly statistics on average rainfall and high and low temperatures, we know what to pack.

Bidding sites

Pick: Luxury Link (www.luxurylink.com) is like many of the sites allowing bargain hunters to bid on hotel rooms, cruises and other travel services. Some of the supposed deals aren’t deals at all, and many of the packages come with fine-print rules and conditions.

That said, savvy shoppers can find a few deals. We recently booked a package at the Brewery Gulch Inn, a AAA-rated four-diamond lodging in Mendocino, Calif. The inn’s standard published prices for a three-night stay started at $600; we paid about $300 for our three-night package, which included a picnic lunch with wine.

Pick: Priceline (www.priceline.com) has its list of caveats -- and an awful one at that, some say. (Among the rules: no cancellations and no refunds.) But in the last year we’ve used it to get a room at the Hyatt Newporter in Newport Beach for $33 a night, a northern San Diego County Hilton for $41 and the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco for about $60. Thumbs up for rental cars too. We managed a reservation in Kansas City, Mo., for about $12 a day.

Pan: Hotwire (www.hotwire.com) isn’t a bidding site, but it gained a following for discounted “opaque” reservations on plane tickets, hotel rooms and rental cars. Lately our results haven’t been so hot. We have found lower prices using other websites.

Pan: SkyAuction.com (www.skyauction.com) lures prospective bidders with a slew of packages, some with starting bids of $1. But then come the fees. You can bid $1 for a week’s stay in Sedona, Ariz., but even if no one else bids higher -- and someone no doubt will -- you would still have to pay $195 in taxes and SkyAuction fees.

The allure of auctions is the chase of a bargain. But our experience is that overeager, unknowledgeable shoppers regularly beat us by bidding close to retail prices -- or paying more than what a smart shopper could find elsewhere for less. And what’s the fun in that?

James Gilden writes the Internet Traveler column, which appears every other week in Travel.