For good deals on cruises, your main port of entry is the Web

Getting customers to book a cruise is perhaps the last hurdle facing online purveyors of travel. About 4% of all cruises are booked that way, compared with about 27% of airline tickets for leisure and unmanaged business travel (not booked through a corporate travel agency), according to a study by Connecticut-based travel research firm PhoCusWright.

The typical passenger spends about $1,632 for a week’s vacation, according to the Cruise Line International Assn., a New York-based trade group. Online bookings of cruises are expected to triple by 2006, PhoCusWright says, as online agencies improve customer service and increase access to information such as independent reviews, deck plans, photos and other details.

For the do-it-yourself cruiser looking for information, www.cruisecritic.com is a good place to start. This interactive community of cruise travelers, launched in 1995, plans, researches and shares its adventures. The website has professional reviews and profiles of more than 210 individual cruise ships and 50 cruise lines and reviews from its 110,000 registered members.

The lure of shopping on the Web is deals.

To learn where they are, I started at www.cruisesonly.com, which was founded 20 years ago as a traditional cruise travel agency. It now has 500 employees and reports that it sells 10% of the world’s cruises.

I searched for a seven- to 10-night cruise to Mexico in November (about two months in advance). I was asked my ZIP Code and whether any passengers were 55 or older. Cruise lines may offer “resident rates,” discounts based on where you live, or they may give senior discounts. CruisesOnly seeks those fares from the start.

I received 11 itineraries and chose Royal Caribbean’s Vision of the Seas for a seven-nighter to the Mexican Riviera that departs Nov. 14 from Los Angeles. An ocean-view stateroom was $861 per person, excluding taxes, fees and port charges.

Next, I compared that price with the one on the cruise line’s website (www.royalcaribbean.com). For the same category of stateroom and deck level, I was quoted $899 -- $38 per person more than at Cruises- Only. I then went to Travelocity and Expedia, where I found the same $861 rate as CruisesOnly.

My final shopping port was www.cruisecompete.com, a website where 85 travel agents can bid for your business.

“It’s a better mousetrap than the alternative,” said Bob Levinstein, chief executive of the site. There I entered the cruise information and submitted a quote request.

Within five minutes, I received three e-mail quotes, all $861, excluding taxes and fees. At the end of 24 hours, I had seven quotes, the lowest at $793, $68 less than CruisesOnly, Travelocity and Expedia and more than $100 less than Royal Caribbean’s site.

Some tips:

* Shop a site that asks questions about your age and your ZIP Code, and whether you’re a repeat customer. Your answer could get you a better rate.

* Figure out whether taxes and fees are included so you can compare apples to apples.

* Click on specials; many websites have them. On Cruisecritic.com I found a special “residents” deal on the same ship, itinerary and cabin category I had been researching; it left two weeks earlier and cost $599.

“The cruise lines have yield managers that are looking at capacity on an hourly basis, and we update specials as much as daily,” said Bryan Hilliard, a senior project manager with CruisesOnly who oversees technology strategy.

Contact James Gilden at www.theinternettraveler.com.