Courtesy Dan Gilmour

With summer’s travel season only months away, it’s time to start thinking about booking airline tickets. While some consumers will book their flights through a travel agent, many will be shopping online.

Last year, travelers made an average of 21 visits to various Web sites before booking a trip, The New York Times reported recently. Sites like Orbitz.com and Priceline.com have become standards for air travelers, but there’s been a proliferation of new options as well. New meta-search sites search other travel sites to find the best deals. Still others say they can help you decide when to buy by predicting whether ticket prices are about to go up or down.

Meta-search sites

We looked at three of the meta-search sites to get a sense of how they worked. On a recent day, we tested the sites by searching for a round-trip ticket from Redmond Airport, RDM in airport code, to Los Angeles International Airport, LAX, departing May 1 and returning May 8.

Here’s what we found:

Kayak.com

This site has a few cool functions, including one that allows prices to include baggage fees for the number of bags you intend to check.

The cheapest RDM-to-LAX flight we found on Kayak.com was $319, though we also found out it would be $349 with one checked bag.

Kayak.com also offers to run searches in separate windows for Priceline.com, Travelocity .com, Hotwire.com, Expedia .com and Airfare.com. Once you find the airfare you like, Kayak.com — like other meta-search sites — directs you to another site to buy the ticket, sometimes directly from the airline.

Bing.com

Results from this site were nearly identical to Kayak.com’s. The lowest-price ticket we found was $319 without calculating baggage fees.

Bing.com uses an arrow system to indicate whether it’s a good time to buy. When we searched our RDM-to-LAX flight, Bing.com suggested buying now, saying that fares were “rising or steady.”

One interesting feature of Bing .com is the flexible search option. You can select a departure city and multiple destinations, and Bing.com will graph the lowest fares by departure date over the next month. It will also show you what length of stay within a certain range (which you can adjust) is least and most expensive. However, only a limited number of airports for both departures and arrivals are available for graphing, and RDM isn’t on either list.

Fly.com

Launched in the U.S. in early 2009, Fly.com searches several international sources that Kayak.com and Bing.com do not. But for our domestic flight, it returned the same fare we found elsewhere: $319.

Fly.com, like Kayak.com and Bing.com, has a function that allows the traveler to adjust departure and arrival times, and instantly filters out any options that don’t fit your request.

Beth Whitman, a Seattle-based travel guide and creator of the Web site WanderlustandLipstick .com and a series of travel guidebooks under the same name, said she has mixed feelings about booking airfare online.

“I generally do book online,” she said, but “I will tell you, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with the online booking engines. I’m really careful because I’ve been burned in the past.”

When shopping for flights, Whitman will open up a series of browser windows and compare sites like Travelocity.com and Orbitz.com, or for international travel, Vayama.com. She carefully checks every detail of trips, paying close attention to details like length of layovers and changes in carriers, which may not always communicate well with each other. Problems also sometimes arise when one airline’s flight makes you late for another airline’s connection.

Whitman said she’s obsessive about checking flight details.

Whitman also said she’s tried the fare predictors before, and waited to buy when the site predicted prices would go down.

“I’ve looked back and it hasn’t gone down, it’s gone up,” she said. “I haven’t had any luck with them.”

Turbulence

Whitman said she’s also had some bad luck after booking online.

Last year, while traveling from Seattle to Bangkok, Whitman discovered that a connecting flight had been canceled, and Travelocity’s solution was to book her on a flight the next day, leaving her with a 26-hour layover. When she called Travelocity.com’s customer service line, she was told they couldn’t help.

Because of the multiple carriers Whitman was using, she spent four frustrating hours on the phone before she was able to remedy the situation.

“I was on two phones, calling both the airlines and this online booking agent trying to get this sorted out,” she said. “The booking agent folks couldn’t help me out; that was pretty frustrating.”

That’s why Whitman recommends booking directly through the airlines when you can. She said she’ll even spend a little more if she has to.

When contacted about Whitman’s experience with Travelocity, Joel Frey, senior public relations manager for the company, said things should have worked out differently.

“It sounds to me like a sort of extraordinary situation,” Frey said. “In that situation, we work with them to try to get things figured out, (but) there was something that didn’t go quite the way we would hope for.”

He said since hearing about Whitman’s situation, he had attempted to contact her to resolve the issue. He said Travelocity generally tries to notify a traveler when there is a change in flight plans, and he’s not sure why that didn’t happen here.

Frey said he disagreed with Whitman’s recommendation to use a travel agent or book directly with airlines.

“We are a trusted travel agent,” he said. “We’ve booked millions of tickets. Are we perfect? No. That’s why we like to hear from customers like Beth.”

He said unlike airlines, sites like Travelocity may offer deals on packages that include hotels and rental cars. Frey also pointed out that Travelocity has customer service available 24 hours; generally only frequent fliers will get 24-hour access to their travel agents.

Agent advantages

Nonetheless, Whitman said for complicated trips, she likes using a travel agent.

“I have used travel agents in the past; the experience has been wonderful. I think they’re underrated. Especially for someone who’s traveling more than a couple of times a year, it can be beneficial to find a travel agent you trust,” she said.

Travel agents can also help with details like securing any travel visas you might need and understanding how long a layover you need in an unfamiliar airport.

Gabrielle Bryant, a travel agent at Journeys Travel in Bend, has been in the business for 18 years. She said sometimes travel agents can get better deals than are available to the general public, but she doesn’t see any harm in shopping around for the best deal. But in the end, many of her clients simply don’t like the stress of searching online for deals.

“It works for some people and it doesn’t work for others,” she said. If booking online doesn’t appeal to you, a travel agent can book your flight for about $35 to $50. In rare cases, airlines will even pay the agent fees, though Bryant said those are usually high-priced, international flights.

Bryant said potential clients sometimes call in with a deal that she can’t match, and she understands why they choose the cheaper fare. But for complicated trips, or important trips like honeymoons, she said many people still prefer a travel agent.

“If there’s a problem, if you do the online thing, it’s very difficult to get those things fixed,” she said.

Another tip: Many tickets booked online are nonrefundable and nontransferrable, so read fine print carefully. But Travelocity’s Frey pointed out that it’s not just online booking agents that sell restricted tickets.

“That’s anywhere,” he said. “The advice I would give, if you’re booking a trip and there could be something that’s going to necessitate a change, spend the extra money and book a refundable ticket.”