Punch in "travel" at www.google.com and it will suggest more than 23 million references for you to consider. Try it on the Yahoo! portal, and it will offer everything from package deals to research options to online ticket auctions.

There's an embarrassment of cyber riches.

But despite all this, online travel has yet to take off with consumers in the way many observers predicted it would.

According to Marc Phillips, chief analyst for online research firm APT Strategies, Internet travel has simply not lived up to expectations.

"I think the whole travel thing's been disappointing," says Phillips. "For some reason the emotional attachment of travelling, and the consequences attached to it, and the empowerment that the Internet gives, just does not give consumers a failsafe feeling.

"The main point is the elements of a travel transaction. Domestic point-to-point business fares are fine, but the moment you apply a little bit of sophistication ... the functionality of the Web sites doesn't give them options. I gave up years ago trying to book [online]. Even really simple requests like two legs of a flight plus a hotel.

"The biggest problem - and I know this because some of my clients are in the game - is getting [customers] to buy online. There's no problem at all getting them to look, you just can't get them to book."

Janet, a Sydney-based writer, recently booked two one-way tickets, at $55 each, to Brisbane on the Net with one of our domestic carriers. She says she found "the forms confusing, the fields not clear, and I had to keep going back to correct things but found it wouldn't correct".

After much pressing of the "back" button, she finally thought all the details were right, and paid for her tickets - only to find the computer had booked her on a flight leaving at 6.05am, instead of the midday flight she'd selected. Panicked calls to the airline made a change possible, but only because her "use it or lose it" tickets had not been issued. "Very stressful all around," she says.

However, other people we spoke to found booking flights with airlines in Australia "very quick", with "no problems at all" so perhaps it depends partly on how busy the site is, or whether the surfer's browser is behaving itself.

Simon is a regular business traveller who finds it relatively easy to book flights on overseas sites for international trips, but usually makes a phone call when booking in Australia. He uses an agent at travel.com.au, and deals with her through email because he finds the site's online services simply don't provide him with what he needs.

Travel.com.au chief executive David Tonkin says customer feedback over the past two or three years has left the company well aware of its limitations, and it has regularly streamlined and updated the site to make it as user-friendly as possible.

"Besides a point-to-point air fare, the technology is not really there yet to make it easy for the average person to make a transaction," he says. "No-one has the answer yet. What we're trying to do with the current site is offer less choice and less complexity, but some people won't like that either."

Tonkin believes that within three to five years there will be a few "mega online travel companies" with access to global databases of information. This will mean package tours of just about anything to just about anywhere will be available online at wholesale rates.

"It's going to get to the stage where you decide to go on a holiday in the first week of June, want to be near a beach, a golf course and shopping, pay around $2,000 and take less than six hours flying, and [the Web] will come back with four or five choices that fit your requirements, along with theatre tickets and sporting events," he says.

So much for the future - what can the traveller do now on the Net?

Like airlines, rental car companies are trying to direct customers to the Web by offering deals that can save a lot of money - easily $30 or $40 a day.

However, this shouldn't stop you using the phone to make sure you're getting the cheapest deals available. It's not uncommon for companies to better the online deals of rivals to secure your business.

If you're searching for accommodation and tourism options, a good tip is to deal directly with a reputable site in the area you plan to visit. Anne Bruckard and her husband Ossie visited the UK and parts of Europe last year, and while their air fares and some extras were dealt with through their agent, they booked all their accommodation and concert tickets online.

The accommodation was chosen through Smooth Hound Systems, which offers thousands of B&Bs and hotels across the UK. You click on a map of the area you intend to visit and are given the available options. And while you can book through the site, Bruckard chose only B&Bs with email addresses so she could book directly.

"We tended to go for places we could see pictures of and find out something about them on the Web," she says. "There were only two out of 18 that weren't so crash hot. We also booked concert tickets and theatre tickets direct, and were able to choose the seats we wanted."

Another traveller who's had great success dealing direct is Tim Galvin. An enthusiastic climber for many years, he is planning a trip to an old haunt - Yosemite National Park in California - later this year. After queuing up for camp sites in the past, and often being disappointed, this time he booked a place online through the US National Parks Service.

"It's amazing," he says. "You can pull down a plan of the camp site showing every plot. It also tells you exactly what the plot is like: whether it has shade. whether it's stony, what car parking it has and which way it faces. Then you can just book the one you want with your credit card."

David Stewart-Hunter, chief executive of Internet monitoring agency Media Metrix, says the Australians are relatively unenthusiastic about online travel services compared with other Internet-strong countries.

His statistics show that between October and December last year, 14 per cent of Net users in Australia accessed a specialist travel site such as qantas.com.au. In the US, that figure was nearly doubled. Twenty-one per cent of users in the UK clocked up a travel site visit, while in Japan the figure was 17 per cent.

The most popular travel sites for Australians to visit, during the same period, show our penchant for snapping up cheap air fares. Ranked in order they are: Qantas (4.5 per cent), Ansett (3.2 per cent), Impulse Airlines (2.4 per cent), Travel.com.au (2.1 per cent) and Virgin Blue (1.8 per cent).

The managing director of ecommerce consultancy Imagine Online, Andrew Thompson, has researched customer perceptions and needs about travel and the Net extensively. The same answers keep coming back from his focus groups: researching on the Web is great, and more fun than going to an agent, but booking can be difficult.

"Seven out of every eight people in a focus group will say the interfaces of travel sites are incredibly cumbersome and frustrating," he says.

"All the sites at the moment compare air fares on specific dates and times. It's not 'I want to go to London, with a side trip to Germany, and if there's a better deal on another day I'll look at it'. There's a huge market with great potential, and if you crack it, you're the next Bill Gates ... but for holidays nobody's within coo-ee yet."

Getting the best out of travel sites

1 Research and enjoy! This is what travel sites are best at. You'll have a ball - discovering tiny, eccentric sites that will provide great insights into places you plan to visit.

2 Major travel sites often expect you to sign up as a member after a few visits - and you usually need to be a member to book through them. Don't sign up unless you plan to visit the site regularly, or you'll be bombarded with a lot of information you don't need. Alternatively, set up a separate junk email address.

3 If your trip involves air travel, you can get quotes from different Web sites, but most can't easily deal with a booking more complicated than a return flight.

4 Investigate accommodation using sites based in the country you're visiting.

5 Check the credentials of the site before you book. Larger companies or sites that are well established are always safer.

6 A "secure" Web booking protects your credit card data from being tampered with in e-transit, says Ramin Marzbani, of Net research company www.consult, but it doesn't stop someone from hacking into the site afterwards. Try to buy only from sites that have some sort of guarantee for customers.

Who's buying?

The average online travel customer is 35, while the average ticket fare is $750, according to Net research company www.consult. With 22 per cent of all travel and event tickets bought online, the Net has made a solid impact on ticket sales, although not supplanting traditional means of sale.

Airline dogfights take to the Web

You'd have to have been touring Timbuktu, without a laptop, over the past nine months to have missed the airline price war.

Last year's entry into the Australian market of low-fare carriers Impulse and Virgin Blue has seen one-way fares in some sectors drop as low as $33: "At present price levels nobody's making money," says David Huttner, Virgin Blue's head of commercial business.

As most of the bargains are available only on the Net, business has been brisk, so making the sites as user friendly as possible is a goal for all the players.

Impulse's marketing manager, Adrien Baker, says between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of Impulse's sales are online, so "it's vitally important. We put a lot into it to keep it simple ... and that's where many of the savings are for the customer: time."

The general manager of online sales for Qantas, John Lonergan, says the airline is hoping all its product information will eventually be available on the Web: from meals and movies on flights to the location of lounges at international airports and what power plugs you'll need in Japan.

"If we're going to do online booking we want to do it really well - we want to have the best in class if we can," he says. "What we're doing, though, is trying to work from the simple to the complex: get the simple stuff working well and then work from there."

"We hope," says Huttner, "to move more services to the Web, including special ordering, car rentals and holiday products as well. But most of our customers simply want it to be quick and efficient, so if the extras aren't related to travel, they're not interested."

Ansett is busy with secret online innovations, but is also making some finishing touches to updates, which are being shown to focus groups for their opinion. These innovations, says a spokeswoman, are part of how the airline "offers choice" to its technology-friendly customers.

Neither Ansett nor Qantas offers email updates of their latest deals to the public - something Virgin and Impulse both do - but the cheaper tickets can earn frequent-flyer points. Lonergan says that once Qantas has settled on the best way to communicate with its frequent flyers, it will offer a service to the wider market.

APT Strategies

Travel.com.au

Smooth Hound Systems

US National Parks Service

Media Metrix

Qantas

Ansett

Impulse Airlines

Virgin Blue