According to a new survey, more people in Britain now book their holidays independently than buy an “old-fashioned” package holiday. This is some turnaround from the heyday of package tourism, when British holidaymakers transformed destinations such as the Costa Brava and Mallorca. And the leader of the independent revolution is definitely the internet — where you can find your own hotels and flights, book the rental car, track down the best deals and weed out vital information.

Here at the Travel section, we’ve been using and writing about the internet for almost a decade now, and — at the risk of coming over like web geeks — we reckon we know a thing or two about it. We’ve seen many travel websites come and go, some improving, others going downhill, and we’ve had ample time to sort the winners from the time-wasters.

Here, we share the current leaders — the sites that you really should have in your own list of favourites.

www.inyourpocket.com

Most guidebook publishers are understandably reluctant to post their valuable content online. In Your Pocket is an exception. Its compact guides to Central and Eastern Europe cities are free to download at the company’s website. But don’t be misled into thinking they’re worthless. Written by resident journalists and updated every two months, they are easy to navigate, irreverent and forensically detailed. Vitally, they also have their fingers on the pulse of Europe’s most exciting and dynamic cities, from Berlin to Vilnius, Cracow to Zagreb. If you decide to splash out on a hard copy, the guides — all available locally — cost only about £1.50.

www.traveljungle.co.uk

Much as we love the internet, it can be maddening. Sifting through dozens of different sites for the cheapest air fares is a grim, painstaking task. TravelJungle does all the work for you. Simply type in when and where you want to fly and it will search through hundreds of sites, delving deep into their reservations data so you are shown only flights that are currently available. Recently, Eurostar fares have been added. Although TravelJungle doesn’t search through every site on the web, and allows paying sponsors to leapfrog to the top of the results page, we still love it.

www.laterooms.com

Hoteliers love the Laterooms site because it allows them to offload “distressed stock” without advertising the fact to all and sundry. In plain English, this means they can guess how many rooms they will have vacant on any particular night and slash the prices to the point where they become irresistible to internet surfers. With more than 50,000 hotels worldwide on its books, and reductions of up to 70%, Laterooms offers plenty of choice, mostly for the following seven days.

With this site, you don’t book online — you have to phone the hotel and quote a refe- rence number.

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