A step-by-step guide for finding the best airfares

The more time you allow and the more you understand the market, the better your odds for finding the best price. "First you have to figure out what a good airfare is to Helsinki or wherever you're going," said Budget Travel magazine editor Erik Torkells. "Then when you see it, you grab it." Farecast.com presents charts that show past price trends for a particular route, and predict (with about 75 percent accuracy, according to the site) when prices will be lowest in the future. Bestfares.com is another great site for fares and consumer news.

Airfarewatchdog.com is a nifty site that will send out daily or weekly alerts about most bargain fares from a given airport. It's an independent site, and no airlines are omitted. For bargain hunters, it presents an invaluable snapshot of what's cheap and when. Worth noting: Airfarewatchdog.com tracks airline "promo-code" fares that other sites don't yet catch.

Travelocity.com and some other booking sites offer an option to send e-mail alerts when airfares on chosen routes drop or rise significantly; this is also a good trend-watching tool. Smartertravel.com has a feature that compiles bargain fares from MSP at a glance.

More and more airlines are using promotional rates and e-mail offers to lure traffic to their websites. By signing up for e-mail alerts at your commonly used airlines, you get notice of these fares that you might not otherwise find.

Kayak.com is my favorite basic tool for researching and booking airfares. This site quickly checks almost all airlines' fares and presents them at a glance, along with charts that show the price trend for that route. It also offers an option to check rates three days before and after your preferred dates.

Flying legs of a journey overseas? Dohop.com lets you check fares from Stuttgart, Germany, to Prague or Bangkok to Mumbai, India.

MSP is a charter package hub. Weekly deals to sunny destinations from our biggest operator, worryfreevacations.com, are proferred at midnight on Tuesdays, and these days, they're snapped up quickly. I watched a $200 round-trip fare to Costa Rica slip through my fingers at the end of January because I didn't stay up until midnight. Also check suncountry.com and funjet.com for weekly specials.

Northwest is aggressively enticing WorldPerks members to use their miles to pay down the cost of tickets. "Sometimes it's a great deal," said fare guru Terry Trippler. "Sometimes they're not so great." As an example, my spouse cut the rate of a flight to St. Louis from $425 to $225 by including 10,000 of her frequent flier miles in the deal.

Right now, some air-hotel packages to Europe are as cheap as air alone would be. You sacrifice your lodging choice, but gain value. Packages can be found at most airlines' sites as well as the bigger booking engines, such as orbitz.com and expedia.com. Cheaptickets.com is appealing to the YouTube set with a weekly video (released Tuesdays at about 10 a.m.) that gives a quick rundown on good package deals.

But be alert: With a little research you can pick a clean, safe hotel on your own. A decent hotel room in most of Latin America and Southeast Asia can be had for under $40. You won't find deals like that on the airlines' sites.

Being your own travel agent poses some hazards. On complex routes and unusual destinations a travel agent can still save time and money and offer an extra layer of protection and help if things go wrong. Also remember that when you book multiple legs of a journey on different airlines, you have no protection when one leg lands late and your next plane leaves without you. You'll have to pony up for another ticket.