Web merchants go global

International travelers are a case in point. Only about 10 percent of trips booked online are to intercontinental destinations, according to the technology consulting firm Forrester Research. With such a small market, online travel agencies have been slower to institute the sorts of features and innovations they have lavished on domestic travelers.

But that's starting to change, as Web travel merchants like Orbitz and Expedia expand their international air fare offerings to give consumers considerably more itinerary and airline choices. Those improvements take their places a mouse click away from some long-standing, but harder to find, foreign cyberfare resources that consumers should not overlook.

Given the complexity of booking foreign itineraries, it is little surprise that online sites have concentrated elsewhere until now. "If you're traveling from Hartford to Washington, for example, there are only so many combinations of connections that'll get you there," said Jeff Grant, Orbitz's vice president for product marketing. "The pile of options is large, but it's infinitely small compared to the number of ways you can get from L.A. to Frankfurt."

Adding to the complexity, Grant said, is the fact that some of the best fares are those that are pieced together with different airlines, in different countries, with varying taxes, fees and currencies. Orbitz needed more than a year to devise a system to process that much information within the span of a typical online air fare search, but its efforts paid off nicely. In late August, the Web site began displaying all of its international fare search results in the same gridlike display - or matrix, in Orbitz lingo - that it uses for domestic fares.

The result is significantly more selection and lower fares than were previously available, and a much deeper selection than can be found on other full-service travel sites. In early October, for example, I searched for a flight between New York (from JFK) and Pisa, for a hypothetical two-week Tuscan vacation in November. Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia returned similar fares, roughly $420, but Orbitz returned 73 flight options, including a wide array of flights on 10 airlines.

For the same flight, Expedia displayed 16 options on four airlines; Travelocity listed nine flights on four airlines. The additional flights are, of course, useful for those looking for a wide selection of travel times, but they can also be important for people seeking to redeem frequent flier miles on specific carriers.

On the heels of that upgrade, Orbitz also extended its Deal Detector feature to cover international fares. That service, which can be found on the site's home page, prompts users to type in their preferred destination and price limit, then sends an e-mail when that fare is available. (Travelocity has a similar feature, called Fare Watcher).

Until this fall, Expedia's international air fare choices were more limited. According to Barney Harford, Expedia's vice president for air, car and private label, the company is working on a new version of air fare search technology, with part of the upgrade focused on its international fare searches. When the upgrade is completed sometime next year, he said, international air fare customers will be able to select outbound and return flights separately, rather than as one round-trip option. Until then, some flight searches will, like Orbitz's and Travelocity's, show the round-trip options, which can give you a bigger list of itineraries, Harford said.

Late last year Expedia made it easier to book so-called multidestination trips - say, from New York to London to Paris, with a return flight from Paris. For 66 foreign cities Expedia also offers users the chance to make reservations for hotels, car rentals and sightseeing activities. Consumers can save a decent amount of money by bundling such services into one purchase, because while airlines, hotels and other travel suppliers hate displaying cheap fares individually, they're perfectly comfortable hiding their discounts in a package deal. In October, Expedia listed a vacation package to Paris, for instance, including a flight on Air France and six nights at the Hyatt Regency Paris Madeleine for $1,278 a person. Booked separately, the trip would have cost $1,580 (the hotel alone would have cost $1,218).

The big three online travel agencies aren't, of course, the only places to find international air fare deals. While major carriers frequently offer inexpensive fares through these Web sites, they also sometimes keep bargains confined to their own cyberturf. For example, American Airlines' Web site, www.aa.com, had a sale on flights from New York to Zurich over the Thanksgiving weekend for $259 round trip. Although Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz are big sellers of American Airlines tickets - and Orbitz is partly owned by American - their best deals on the same itinerary cost considerably more. Travelocity charged $338, Expedia $375 and Orbitz $342.

There are other Internet wild cards worth playing, if the better-known sites fail to yield bargains. One possibility, ETN (www.etn.nl), which bills itself as the "mother source for finding cheap fares online" and is based in Costa Rica, actually relies on offline travel agents to deliver online bargains. According to Ad Latjes, ETN's founder and chief executive, the company takes travel requests online and, at no charge, distributes them to roughly 50 agents in the United States.

These agents are consolidators - so called because they buy blocks of tickets for a given destination from airlines, and offer them at discounts to customers. One pitfall of buying from consolidators is that these tickets usually cannot be changed or canceled (terms that have also become fairly common among online bargain fare sites).

I had some good luck on ETN. Beneath the Fare Request Form heading on the site's home page, I clicked on a link for U.S.A. Departures. From there, I filled out a form with a travel request - JFK to Pisa - and read the site's pledge that my request would be answered within one hour by five U.S.-based agents. Just one agent got back to me in the allotted time, but it was worth it. Cardinal Points Travel, a Dallas-based travel agency that sells seats from consolidators specializing in European air fares, among other things, e-mailed me with a price of $307 - or about $400, including tax.

According to Latjes, ETN's founder, most of the agents who respond to fare requests check the online sites first, because they know if they can't quote a lower fare, the customer won't be interested. Most of the time, he said, they'll find the best fare, "although it's hard to guarantee because there's always some kind of sale going on. But a good agent who specializes in an international destination can still beat the online engines."