Shopping online for airline tickets, hotel rooms and rental cars could save you hundreds of dollars on your next vacation. The challenge is knowing where to find the best deals. Dozens of new travel Web sites appear each year, all of them claiming to offer big savings, but no one has time to try them all. Here’s the smart way to find online travel bargains…

Step 1: Go to the source.

The special bargain prices offered directly by airlines, hotel chains and car rental chains on their company Web sites often are lower than the prices available through third-party travel sites.

Type the name of an airline, hotel chain or car rental company into a search engine to locate its Web site, then look for a tab labeled “Special Fares,” “Special Deals,” “Special Offers” or something similar. Most of these sites also let you sign up for e-mail notification of future bargain rates, which is a great way to keep posted on travel deals.

Example: On Continental Airlines’ Web site, click “Deals & Offers,” then click “continental.com Specials” for last-minute bargain fares, or “Special Offers” for ongoing promotional rates. (Continental is particularly likely to offer bargain fares to or from Houston, Cleveland and Newark, New Jersey, where the airline operates hubs.)

Such special deals are most appropriate for travelers who can be flexible about when and where they go, not those who need to reach a specific destination on a specific date.

If you do not have time to check every major airline or hotel chain site, at least check the sites of the airlines that have the most flights out of your local airport and the large hotel chains that you like the most. Note: Try the same kind of search on car rental sites.

Cruise lines also feature attractive last-minute deals on their Web sites in the weeks prior to departure. Before accepting one of these deals, however, consider that unless you live in or near the cruise’s city of departure, you will have to buy airline tickets as well. If last-minute airfare to the cruise’s departure port (and back from its destination port) is expensive, your last-minute cruise bargain might not be so cheap after all.

Step 2: Try the “big three” Internet travel services.

Expedia.com, Orbitz.com and Travelocity.com are the largest, most comprehensive travel Web sites. (While not one of the top three, Kayak.com, which searches multiple other travel sites, is worth trying, too.) You can use these sites to search for the best rates on a specific travel itinerary or scan their lists of last-minute specials. Though these sites are very similar in many ways, it is worth trying all of them. They frequently turn up different rates and different deals for the same itinerary.

Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity tend to offer their very best deals less than one week in advance of the travel date — but only if airlines, hotels and rental car companies happen to have excess inventory. When demand is strong, last-minute prices can be extremely high. If you have a specific destination and date of travel in mind, it is best to search these sites two months or more in advance. During holidays: If you can be flexible, you might be able to snap up last-minute bargains by looking just before the date you hope to leave. Otherwise, shop far in advance.

Consider searching these sites for package deals that bundle airfare, hotel and rental car — or two of the three — together. Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity sometimes offer very attractive deals to those who buy two or three of these things at once, particularly when they are traveling to a popular vacation destination such as Orlando, Las Vegas or San Francisco. (Also search for airfare, hotel and rental car individually, to make sure that the package really is a good deal.) Note: The prices quoted by travel Web sites can change rapidly. If one rate is substantially better than any other rate that you have found, wrap up your rate comparison quickly and take the deal before it disappears.

Step 3: Search bargain-hunter travel site Hotwire.com if you are planning a last-minute trip.

Hotwire works with airlines, hotels, automobile rental agencies and cruise lines to sell remaining inventory in the week or two before the travel date. Markdowns of 50% or more are common.

Example: The site sometimes offers rental cars for less than $10 per day.

Other bargain-hunter travel sites worth a look include Cheapflights.com and LastMinuteTravel.com.

Step 4: Vet your hotel online.

Hotel “bargains” are not truly bargains if the hotel is not a nice place to stay. Unfortunately, it sometimes is difficult to judge the quality of a hotel before you arrive. Ratings found in printed travel guides are often inaccurate or out of date. Solution: Visit Web sites TripAdvisor.com and VirtualTourist.com to read hotel reviews from other travelers before reserving a room online.

Do not let just one or two extremely positive or negative reviews sway you excessively — these reviews might have been posted by a biased source, such as the hotel’s management or a disgruntled ex-employee. Pay most attention to the latest reviews, because older reviews could include out-of-date information.

Step 5: See if Priceline.com can beat the best deal that you have located.

Priceline.com lets users make an offer, then either accepts or rejects their bids.

Once you have located the best price that you can find on airline tickets or a rental car from the Web sites mentioned above, bid perhaps 20% less on Priceline.com. If your bid is rejected, accept the best offer that you have found elsewhere.

Helpful: The Web site BidonTravel.com offers more strategies for smart Priceline bidding.

Priceline.com is best used for airline tickets and rental cars, not hotel rooms. The Web site does not tell you which company is accepting your bid until after you have completed the transaction. That usually is not a problem with airline tickets and car rentals — it doesn’t make much difference whether Hertz or Avis rents you a car — but it can make a big difference with hotel rooms. When you bid on a hotel stay at Priceline, you gamble that the hotel that accepts your offer is somewhere that you would want to stay — not a worthwhile gamble, in my view.

Note: You have limited control over what you get. For example, you can’t choose flight times, and while you can choose the size of a rental car, you can’t choose the model.

CLOSING THE DEAL

Use a credit card to pay travel Web sites. Credit cards provide a measure of consumer protection that debit cards and other forms of payment do not — if unexpected fees or charges are tacked on to your bill, you can contest them through the card issuer.

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