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Which travel websites are the most popular? Can you save money by learning about them?

Sometimes. Millions of travelers can’t be wrong in making their Internet choices. And the choices of those millions are tabulated on www.alexa.com, which ranks the popularity of travel websites, starting with www.expedia.com (No. 1 in popularity) and proceeding to www.iranair.com (No. 500).

The tabulation goes deeper than that; for example, No. 550 in terms of popularity is the “Budget Traveler’s Guide to Sleeping in Airports,” at www.sleepinginairports.net/airports.htm. But the top 50 most popular travel websites are enough to provide us with important leads.

Of those top 50 websites, a few are heavily used U.S.-related airfare search engines (Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia, Priceline and Yahoo) that many American travelers are familiar with. Eleven are the sites of the biggest U.S. airlines, starting with Southwest and American Airlines, and two are the largest cut-rate European airlines: Ryanair and EasyJet. Added to the airfare search engines, they account for 19 of the most popular 50 sites.

Also appearing in the top 50 are the heavily used websites of five popular hotel chains and four overseas airlines. Two are the heavily used currency websites -- www.xe.com and www.oanda.com -- that help you track exchange rates; and one is the Canadian version of Expedia.

This makes 31 websites out of the top 50 that are most widely known by travelers. The remaining 19 include useful sites that, popular as they might be, are still not known to everyone.

One of those 19 is the handy European-operated www.venere.com, which provides rates for thousands of hotels in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. Many prices included on the site are specially discounted. Those planning a transatlantic trip should consult this site.

Another useful site is www.vrbo.com, which stands for Vacation Rentals by Owner, listing U.S. vacation homes and their rates, as offered directly by the people who own them. To choose a property for your vacation, you deal directly with that owner, avoiding the fees of a middleman.

Of the rental-car companies, only the website of Enterprise Rent-a-Car is in the top 50, suggesting that many people continue to make car reservations over the phone and not the Internet.

If you’re looking for grass-roots reviews of a hotel you’re thinking of booking, try www.tripadvisor.com, another of the top 50. Hotels are reviewed by travelers, although with some properties you need to be careful that the deck wasn’t stacked by the property itself.

Of the various series of travel books, the websites of www.fodors.comwww.frommers.com and www.lonelyplanet.com are found.

The continued heavy use of travel agents (and not the Internet) to make cruise reservations probably accounts for the fact that cruise line websites aren’t common in the top 50 (www.royalcaribbean.com is an exception), although the website of one major cruise discounter -- www.vacationstogo.com -- is. Vacationstogo.com lists many heavily discounted cruises.

If you’ve ever consulted the various websites for hotel reservations in Las Vegas, you’ll want to know about www.vegas.com. Operated by the city’s major newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun, it is among the 50 most popular websites and is a model for sites dealing with any location.

To consult the entire list of the 50 most popular websites, go to www.alexa.com, click on “travel” (under Recreation), then on “Most popular in travel,” and under that listing, click on “See top sites in all travel categories.”

You might find the exercise valuable.