According to the latest statistics, 21m people in Britain will use the internet to research their summer holidays this year. That’s a lot of clicks. It’s also, in all likelihood, a lot of time wasted.

That’s because most people, when they plan or book, begin at a search engine such as Google. Big mistake — unless you particularly enjoy scrolling through millions of irrelevant results. A better place to begin would be Timesonline.co.uk. From the beginning of April, our relaunched search engine will enable you to access 5,000 meticulously researched travel articles, search through thousands of classified ads and find exclusive hotel deals.

Thus armed, you can venture onto the world wide web. But tracking down the best deals there is no cinch. Some of the best-known names online — and many of the sites that appear at the top of Google results pages — are of only limited use. Here’s how to sort the wheat from the chaff and find the sites that will save you time and money.

BARGAIN AIR FARES

One of the most popular places to look for cheap flights is Expedia.co.uk. It’s by far the most visited travel site in the UK, with almost 10% of the market, but it is rarely the best place to search for fares. That’s because it features neither no-frills carriers such as EasyJet and Ryanair, nor any charter flights. Along with rivals such as Opodo, Lastminute.com and Ebookers, Expedia is an online travel agent, not a search engine, so it can find you a flight, but not necessarily the cheapest one.

Cheapflights.co.uk is one of the 10 most visited travel sites in the UK. This is known as a Google-friendly site because, if you type almost any combination of words including cheap, flights and air fares into Google, you’ll find Cheapflights at or near the top of the results page. But that doesn’t mean it’s any good — Google isn’t in the business of making holiday recommendations. It just finds popular sites with relevant content.

In fact, although Cheapflights calls itself a price-comparison site, it is really just a collection of lists. Even when you enter your destination and the dates you want to travel, it is unable to run a simple fare search. Instead, it provides a series of links to partner sites such as Ebookers, Airline Network and British Airways. To compare fares, you need to click on each link individually and wait as it opens on a new page. To find its best fare to Hong Kong, I had to create no fewer than eight new search pages. Tedious.

You’re better off with a comparison site such as Travelsupermarket.com. In spite of its name, Travelsupermarket doesn’t sell anything. Instead, it burrows around in the pages of other sites to find the best deals. Fast and accurate, it provides “deep links” into booking pages. Most significantly, it compares scheduled, no-frills and charter flights all in one place.

Even so, Travelsupermarket is far from perfect. It will only find flights departing from the UK, and it can’t access every fare. It’s a pay-per-click business, so airlines or agents that refuse to pay for click-throughs are not listed.

For instance, it doesn’t list the new generation of business-only airlines crisscrossing the Atlantic: Silverjet, Maxjet and Eos. I asked it to find the cheapest business fare to New York in mid-March. It quoted £1,067 with Air India. In fact, Maxjet (0800 023 4300, www.maxjet.com) had the same dates for £599, and it offers a 60in seat pitch, compared to 47in in Air India’s business class. At least Travelsupermarket isn’t complacent. It claims it will have Maxjet, Eos and Silverjet on the site within the next three weeks.

How do you know whether a comparison site is checking every available flight? You don’t. So it pays to check fares at two or three. I’d recommend Dohop.com and Skyscanner.net. Both are strong on no-frills. Skyscanner even shows domestic cheapies in India and Australia, although — bizarrely — it doesn’t list British Airways flights.

How much can you save with this approach? Let’s say you fancy a weekend in Gdansk in June. First, you might go to Expedia, which showed me flights for £175.70, via Warsaw, with the Polish flag carrier, Lot. Not a Lot of good.

Travelsupermarket came up with a fare of £56.71 with Ryanair — it flies nonstop to Gdansk from Stansted, albeit with a 6am departure. A huge improvement. But only when I checked with Skyscanner did I find a more civilised option: an afternoon flight from Luton with Wizz Air for £73.65.

It was a similar story for London to Hong Kong, also in June. Expedia quoted £347 on Qatar Airways via Doha. Travelsupermarket dug out the same flights, but for £297 with Southalltravel.co.uk. That’s a £50 saving for a minute’s work.

Skyscanner can’t access most long-haul fares, but it did point out that Oasis, the Hong Kong-based no-frills carrier, will get you there and back, nonstop, for just £269.

HOTEL DEALS

You might have thought a hotel room was a basic commodity with a fixed price, subject to the occasional tour operators’ mark-up. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rates depend on a raft of factors, and vary wildly from one seller to the next. The web is great for finding cheap rooms, but only if you know where to look. Whatever you do, don’t Google. You’ll be inundated with results, even if you know exactly where and when you want to stay.

Again, use a comparison site. Travelsupermarket scores well as it has access to more than 50 sites belonging to hotel groups, agents and discounters. Some of the price discrepancies are baffling. Rates for a night in June at the Grand Hyatt in Bangkok, for example, ranged from £161 to £245.

Two rival sites are also worth checking out here: Hotelscomparison.com and Traveljungle.co.uk. Like Travelsupermarket, they provide deep links into booking pages and include taxes in their initial quotes. However, there’s a twist. If you’re booking late, you need to adopt different tactics. Try the comparison sites, by all means, but also check the deals at Wotif.com — where you can book up to 28 days in advance — and Laterooms.com, which has a lead-in time of seven days. With both, you can get up to 70% off published rates.

Increasingly, hotels are trying to deter guests from using online discounters by offering best-price guarantees, so it’s worth checking rates on their own websites. But this can present its own problems, such as finding the right site. Trying to find a hotel website can be a frustrating business. Go to Google and you may have to wade through pages of dodgy discounters — and legitimate tour operators — before you hit pay dirt.

Let’s say you want to check out the Halkin, one of London’s most exclusive five-star properties. Google the words “Halkin hotel” and you won’t find the hotel’s own site in the top 50 results.

How do you find it, then? First, try searching without the word “hotel”. This brings the site (www.halkin.como.bz) up to fifth place. You can also select “Pages from the UK”, which brings it up to second. Obviously, this won’t work for hotels abroad.

Another strategy is to type “inurl:Halkin”. This asks Google only for addresses that contain the word Halkin, and brings the hotel up to third place. It’s also worth trying Yahoo.co.uk, where a search for “Halkin” returned the correct site in first place.

Sometimes, you simply need the hotel’s correct name. For instance, a search on Google for the White Sands resort, in the Maldives, which is featured by numerous UK tour operators, proved fruitless. A quick scan down the results, however, revealed that the hotel’s full name is White Sands Resort & Spa. Search for this and the page you want (www.naiaderesorts.com) magically rises to the top.

Then there’s the whole Tripadvisor phenomenon. The site turns up with an alarming regularity on Google results pages — it’s a review site that claims to have more than 5m hotel write-ups submitted by individual users — but one of the ways it makes money is by directing you to booking sites.

TripAdvisor has attracted a lot of bad press because it is open to abuse, both from enthusiastic hotel managers writing their own glowing reviews, and from vengeful rivals putting the boot in. What’s more, TripAdvisor isn’t a great place to go for cheap room rates. This is because it searches only a limited number of sellers, two of which — Expedia and Hotels.co.uk — happen to be owned by TripAdvisor’s parent company.

An example. Suppose you liked the look of the Tribeca Grand, in New York. And why wouldn’t you? A total of 110 reviewers on TripAdvisor give it an average rating of four out of five. So you check room rates for two nights in May, and find both Expedia and Hotels.co.uk quoting £589.48.

The hotel’s website quotes the same rate, suggesting that this is the correct price. But it took me just two minutes to find the same two nights for £395.20 at Travelsupermarket. Saving: £194.

CHEAP CAR HIRE

Few people understand the arcane business of car-rental pricing. For any given week, one vehicle might cost £100 with Company A and £200 with Company B. The following week, Company B might be cheaper. Brand loyalty can prove expensive. If you’re deeply attached to the high levels of customer care provided by a particular company — in which case, you probably ought to have your head examined — then you’re likely to miss out on the best deals.

So, your choices are these. You can go to a company such as Avis.co.uk or Hertz.co.uk. Both have slick websites, and sometimes their prices are competitive.

Alternatively, you can go to a broker such as Holidayautos.com, which searches a clutch of suppliers to find the best price.

But, again, you can go one better by using a comparison site. The best of these — Carrentals.co.uk — sorts through hundreds of prices in seconds.

For instance, for a week’s rental of an economy-sized car at Malaga airport in July, Avis.co.uk quoted £142. Holidayautos got the price down to £81, but Carrentals came in at just £76.52.

With all those nasty extras yet to come, we’ll take the cheapest price, thanks.

Ready to launch...

From April, more than 5,000 articles from The Sunday Times, The Times and The Sunday Times Travel magazine will be searchable on the newly relaunched Times Online Travel website.

You will be able to look for ideas by selecting a destination or holiday type — as specific as villas in Greece, walking in Spain or foodie hols in India, for example — and then drilling down through the archives to find the trip for you. Each article on the website will be linked to companies with which you can book, and even the adverts you see on the page will be relevant to your search.

You will also be able to click on Travel Search to browse through thousands of classified adverts, search 21,000 villas and cottages at Holiday Rentals, and get free nights or room upgrades through Travel Intelligence.