Making real or wishful travel plans? Check multiple sites at once on the Net

NEW YORK — Summer's here. It's time for my annual ritual of dreaming of all the places I wish I could go: Seattle, Sydney, Paris.

Thanks to the Internet, I can search for a flight to paradise from my windowless office, even if I lack the cash and the time to take the trips.

Frequent travelers are no doubt familiar with the online travel agencies like Expedia Inc., Cendant Corp.'s Orbitz LLC and Sabre Holdings Corp.'s Travelocity.com — the ones that have given traditional travel agents more free time to, well, travel.

Lesser known are the travel search engines that check multiple sites at once and can uncover Web specials and airlines that the big three online agencies might miss.

I checked out four of them — FareChase from Yahoo Inc., Kayak.com, Mobissimo and SideStep — as I searched for 11 imaginary trips through Labor Day.

The search engines typically gave me the best fares. That's because the agencies add a service fee — Orbitz charged $6.99 for a recent trip to San Francisco, for instance — while the search engines usually take me to airlines' Web sites for direct booking without fees. In many cases, the agencies' fares are only a few dollars pricier after the fees are added.

Yahoo appeared to give me the best fares most of the time — before I noticed it rounded prices down, making them appear $1 cheaper. Shame on Yahoo.

Factoring that in, Kayak.com most often had the best fare — six times — while Yahoo came up best — or tied — five times. Mobissimo was on top four times, and SideStep Inc. tied for first once.

That's not to say the online travel agencies should be dismissed completely.

For a trip to Paris, Orbitz found an Aer Lingus flight that was $423 cheaper than what the search engines found, even though they all include Orbitz and sister site CheapTickets in their checks. Orbitz also tied for first on another trip.

Expedia and Travelocity, which do not allow the multisite engines to search their sites, also had the cheapest now and then. (And shame on Expedia as well for rounding down to appear cheaper.)

Of course, availability and prices can change by the minute. So for any given search, all seven sites were checked within five minutes of one another, and each trip was searched twice.