Best travel web sites.(Information Service Review)(Buyers Guide)

Of the biggest travel web sites, Travelocity (www.travelocity.com) generally offers the lowest fares for the most-convenient routes. Expedia (www.expedia.com) often has the hands-down lowest fares--but you may encounter routes that don't work.

Those are among the findings of the Consumer Reports Travel Letter, which recently evaluated web sites that offer tickets from multiple airlines. Besides Travelocity and Expedia, we also evaluated Cheap Tickets, OneTravel, Orbitz, and TravelNow.

The findings may help expedite your research when you shop for airfares. But they suggest that you still need to shop around. Consider the following:

* None of the sites included fares for Southwest Airlines, the largest low-fare airline in the country. To check out Southwest's fares, go to www.southwest.com.

* Sites are getting better at matching or beating fares quoted by the largest reservations system used by travel agents. Expedia did so 78 percent of the time. But for flights that depart when you want and don't require inconvenient connections, Travelocity (the best site for that measure) matched or beat the quoted fare only 46 percent of the time.

OUR FINDINGS

Price. Travel Letter staff asked each site for the lowest economy-class fare on 10 busy domestic nonstop routes. We conducted 9 test sessions in all, for a total of 540 flight queries. Simultaneously, we requested this information from Sabre, the leading computer-reservations system used by travel agents but not available to consumers. (Sabre is the parent company of Travelocity.)