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Travel Price comparison websites

No more slogging round the high street with an arm full of brochures. Brits are making record numbers of visits to travel websites and finding that comparing and buying online is where the fun begins.

Spain is still our top destination along with Greece, Lanzarote and Majorca. But you can get flights and hotels just about anywhere in world from the comfort of your own home. Now most airlines sell direct to passengers with an online discount because there is no middle man. It's hard to resist a system which allows you to check-in, print your own boarding pass and even choose your seat at the click of a mouse.

Even the days of trawling through flight websites are fading fast. A new breed of online comparison sites are set to become the travel agents of the modern age. Type in your destination and they do the work for you by sifting through the databases of airlines and sites such as eBookers, Travelocity and lastminute plus a host of others. They then highlight the cheapest deals, saving you time and money. Now they are branching out to cover discounted hotel rates and car hire. Here's a look at what they offer.

Cheapflights.co.uk

With virtually no advertising budget, Cheapflights.co.uk has blossomed from being a fringe start-up running out of an attic in Clapham into the fifth busiest travel site in the the UK's biggest comparison site for bargain flights and travel, with offices in Boston, Massachusetts and London's Marylebone Road. Unlike high-street agents - who maintain specific booking agreements and bonus commission programs with hotel chains and tour operators, Cheapflights does not sell tickets. Instead, it sifts through more than 17m flight deals from more than 900 travel partners every day and displays the best 1m flights.

Kelkoo.com

This European shopping comparison site is well known to internet shoppers. It was bought by Yahoo in 2004 and is booming. It lists products from 6,500 merchants, large and small - a number which is constantly growing. It now acts as a portal to search for the best flight, car hire and hotel rates. It tells you which databases it is looking at during the search process but as with many price comparison sites, it gives greatest profile to paying sponsors so you need to check all the lists carefully before you buy.

Traveljungle.co.uk

Also includes hotels and car hire and has recently been expanded to cover Eurostar. The site claims that you will 'Never miss the best deal again' as it 'searches instead of you simultaneously 24 different low cost carriers (like easy jet, ryan air etc) and 7 online travel agents (like Travelbag, ebookers, opodo etc) to make sure that you really find the cheapest fare available'.

Sponsor companies appear at the top of the results page, so scroll down to make sure you can see whether they are the cheapest option.

SkyScanner.net

A clever site comparing air fares for Europe and Australasia. It describes itself as being 'built on the latest technology supporting more 1.5 million queries a month, returning results in a matter of seconds.' It has a unique and helpful create-your-own-bar-chart function showing the cheapest times to fly in a given weekend, month or day. Plus, if you fancy a short break, but can't decide where to go, click on the 'Weekend' button and SkyScanner will show the cheapest destinations from your local airport across successive weekends.