()As the number of UK travel websites continues to grow (by 28% last year, according to the online analyst Hitwise), some unscrupulous companies have even managed to wriggle to the top of the results pages by burying better-known rivals in their own web pages. Last month, it was reported that Thomson, Thomas Cook and First Choice had used copyright laws to stop smaller companies from using their names on web pages in a bid to make Google’s top 10.

Rather than resorting to such tactics, website owners such as Lyon are turning to viral marketing, word of mouth and chat forums, hoping that the message will spread that specialist comparison websites such as theirs offer the best deals. A similar approach is being taken by Travelsupermarket.com, which launched 18 months ago. Using software developed for the personal finance industry, it searches the sites of airlines and flight consolidators to compare the cheapest fares. A hotel section will be launched in May.

Even without spending vast sums on advertising, the site has 25,000 users every day, a figure it hopes will treble by the end of 2005. The numbers are puny compared with those using Google, but Chris Nixon, director of Travelsupermarket.com, believes that eventually the specialists will nibble the behemoth to death.

“People hear about us by word of mouth, both on- and offline,” Nixon says. “At the moment, many still use Google as their first port of call, but gradually they are realising that Google’s results are becoming less accurate. They are starting their searches at sites like ours.”

Using a comparison site to search for travel products is much more likely to steer you to the best prices. Last week, The Sunday Times ran a price check on two weeks’ car rental from Barcelona airport, beginning on August 1. We typed the words “hire car Barcelona” into Google and got a staggering 1,160,000 results. In addition, there were 112 sponsored links.

Top of the list was www.carjet.co.uk, “the web’s definitive low-cost car-hire company”. After clicking through to the relevant page, we were quoted £336 (for the smallest avail-able car). The highest-placed sponsored link belonged to DoYouSpain.com, which quoted £317.49. Then, we went to Travelsupermarket.com and found an equivalent vehicle for £192 at www.holidayautos.co.uk.

Next, we tried booking a room in New York over the May Day bank holiday. We knew where we wanted to stay, so we searched Google for “Westin New York at Times Square”, which produced 3,760 results. Top of the list was Virgin Holidays, which offered to book the hotel, then said that it was “not available on this date”. The next booking site on the results page was www.cheephotels.co.uk (sic), which quoted £764.76 for three nights, including taxes.

Was this the best price on the net? To find out, we went to www.Hotelscomparison.com , which told us that www.expedia.co.uk could get the same room on the same nights for £559.67. Not bad: a saving of £200 for a few seconds’ work.

Page 2: continues
Page 3: the best sites

()Click and go