Consider this my penance. About a year ago, I subjected readers of this column to 600 words of woe, detailing my frustrating—and ultimately fruitless—online search for a holiday getaway. This year I've cleaned up my act by cutting out the whining and focusing on real solutions. First I homed in on a single goal: figuring out how to get great deals on flights. Then I recruited a crack panel of experts—everyone from Trav-elocity ceo Terrell Jones to CheapTickets vice president Ron McElfresh- to help me ferret out the best insider tricks. Finally I torture-tested their advice to see if it really flew. Here's what I learned: Loyalty is for friends, not travel websites. No one site has a lock on the best deals. That's why my favorite sites aren't the ones where you directly place orders but rather those that let you quickly compare prices on as many as 20 different sites at once: qixo.com (for both Macs and PCs) and farechase.com (for PC users only). These sites work like search engines by scouring dozens of other sites, then presenting the best prices in one handy list. To book a flight, just click; a link takes you back to the site offering the deal that you like. Just remember: neither Qixo nor FareChase is comprehensive, and each lets you perform only one fairly narrow search at a time, so they may miss some deals.
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