Shopping the Internet for airline bargains

(CNN) -- It's springtime and a person's fancy naturally turns to ... finalizing those summer vacation plans. Before you pack your bags and hit the road, you might want to check out the World Wide Web for the hottest new tools to score airfare and hotel bargains. James Hattori spoke with Kim Zetter of PC World magazine to get some tools for your travel needs.

Q: Summer travel season is almost on us, good time to be thinking about your vacation plans, good time to go online. A lot more choices now?

Zetter: A lot more choices this year. A lot of new sites have come up. Discounted sites and sort of overall portal sites, and a lot of different options such as travel plug-ins to help you find great deals.

Q: So, with so many sites that do different things, what's the best place to start?

Zetter: I would start with some of the larger portals first; just do a general search like Expedia or Travelocity to get an overview of what's out there before you home in on the cheaper tickets. There is a site called Qixo, which is looking at a lot of discounters all together. It is an aggregate site; it is looking at something like 17, 18 different sites.

	QUICKVOTE
On which Web site have you found the cheapest tickets? Expedia.com Travelocity.com Qixo.com Travelbyus.com Hotwire.com Priceline.com Other View Results

Q: So what's the advantage of using this site?

Zetter: It's fairly easy to use. You just put in your airport code or city of your departure and destination, when you want to leave, and then it does the search for you. It takes 30 to 60 seconds for the search to complete depending on your connection. I found sometimes it was slower than others.

Q: Another new site?

Zetter: Well, there's Travelbyus which is a site that's using this new software called ITA, which gives you a lot of different sorting options for your results. It will allow you to sort by price, by airline, your departure time and also the total flight time, so it will take into consideration your stop-overs and everything else. It's also looking at a lot of different sites like Expedia or Travelocity and it's looking at all the airlines.

Q: How can these sites look at another site?

Zetter: Well, they have partner agreements with them. Those sites basically open their databases to them.

Q: OK, what if you're looking for the rock bottom, last minute kind of deal? What kind of sites are new?

Zetter: For last minute deals we liked Hotwire a lot. It operates similarly to Priceline. It's competing with Priceline in a similar way, but the difference between Hotwire and Priceline is that you're bidding a price and if Priceline accepts it, you've bought the ticket -- and you're bidding blindly, you don't know what airline or what time you'll fly, anything like that. With Hotwire you specify the date that you're leaving and the city that you're departing from and it gives you a fare. Then you have a 30-minute window to look elsewhere. You don't know what time you're leaving and you don't know what airline, but you do at least have an option of looking at a better airfare elsewhere.

Q: But with Priceline you're locked into that bid if they accept it.

Zetter: With Priceline you're locked into that bid.

Tools Tip: Cheaptickets.com and lowestfare.com are two other web sites that also help you find cheap tickets

Q: What about complex itineraries? You have more than one stop or you know you're going back and forth; can the sites handle those?

Zetter: Not all the sites can. In fact, very few can actually handle legs that aren't roundtrip. So for instance, we booked a flight going to Los Angeles to Nashville, four days later going to Nashville to New Orleans and then back to Los Angeles. Travelbyus and Expedia were the two that we used where you could do that kind of journey and book as all one itinerary, and they returned comparable prices for us. But it wasn't really easy and simple to do an itinerary.

Q: One of the new features that some of the sites offer is really valuable if you travel a lot. If your plane is going to be late or there's a change in the schedule, in some cases, they will send you an e-mail or even page you?

Zetter: Right, they do give you notices. Travelocity, for instance, is one that will page you. It doesn't currently offer other ways of notification, however that is upcoming.

Tools Tip: Other notification features will include: e-mail, cell phone, and fax.

Q: What about international flights?

Zetter: You can book international flights on most of the sites, but it's not often the best option. For instance, if you're looking for the cheapest fares, sometimes the routing that you're going to get is going to be awkward.

Q: With every new site that pops up for travel it seems to put more pressure on the travel agents, but do they still serve a valid need?

Zetter: There are still times when you might choose to use a travel agent instead, if you have a complex itinerary or you're booking a whole package. However, for simple domestic and international trips, there's no need to use an agent anymore. The deals are out there if you know where to look. A lot of people are intimidated by doing their own travel online; they'd prefer handing it over to an agent. But once you've done it once or twice, you get used to the sites that you're comfortable using. There's really no reason not to do it on your own.