It's now almost four years since I started recommending travel websites to Guardian readers. Back then, Google had only just got off the ground, Virgin Atlantic was building a newer, flashier website - "Allow at least a quarter of an hour to navigate the numerous options," I wrote, disapprovingly, at the time - and easyJet and Go were still trying to put each other out of business. Everyone was waiting for the dotcom bubble to burst. And it did.
But the online travel bubble didn't. A few sites went under or were bought out (Remember Trrravel.com and Utravel.co.uk? No, nor do many other people.) Lastminute.com went public and its share price plummeted. But once travellers realised that they no longer had to ring up an obscure bucket shop in Neasden or sit in a queue at Lunn Poly in order to find the cheapest possible holiday, there was no going back.
"Control," said Andrew Nicholson, a Travelocity managing director, when I asked him what he appreciated most about planning trips online. "The control of your time. So you can do it when you're free: whether you're on a dull conference call or at home watching dull TV, you control what you look at. And you're able to assemble some kind of unbiased option because you're not getting someone vertical-selling what they think you want to buy."
Then - just when the suspicion that you weren't quite getting the best bargain started to become annoyingly time-consuming - along came a breed of airlines that promised to be cheaper than any other. "The internet has helped to drive prices down, there's no question about that," says David Soskin, chief executive officer of cheapflights.co.uk. "The rapid growth of easyJet and Ryanair has been helped by the fact that consumers can go directly to their websites."
Once there, they succumb to the lure of the ridiculously low sale prices with which Ryanair, in particular, entices its customers. Sometimes the price they end up paying is considerably more than they would have paid elsewhere. The fact that no one else sells Ryanair seats helps. But the reason why people regularly declare the no-frills sites their favourites is because they are fast, uncluttered and use big blocks of memorable colour - all tricks which prove absolutely irresistible online.
The problem was that everyone else seemed horribly slow in comparison. If it hadn't been for Go, Buzz, easyJet and Ryanair - and broadband connections at the office - we might never have persevered with the lethargic, malfunctioning jerry-built sites which went from concept to launch far too quickly for their own good. Some of these dreadful sites inexplicably hang on, like condemned men on death row. Bob Geldof's 1999 start-up, Deckchair.com, is one of them.
Thankfully, there is more to the online travel revolution than sites selling airline tickets. As a service to those readers who email me regularly about their whereabouts, here are a few of the most sought-after addresses:
· 'I can't find the site about lidos.' (Why do Guardian readers love cold-water bathing so?)
lidos.org.uk.
· 'How can I get to Mongolia/ Istanbul/St Petersburg/across America by train?'
seat61.com.
· 'What's the best site about Turkey?'
infoexchange.com/Turkey/TurkeyMain.html.
· 'Which Greek islands should I avoid?'
greekisland.co.uk/islands/islands.htm.
· 'How can I find a B&B in the Lake District/Cornwall/Norwich?'
visitengland.com.
One of the more unusual correspondents was a gap-year student who emailed me to enquire whether I knew of a site that could help him diagnose a few foreign bodies he might have picked up somewhere in Thailand. Whether Dr Thom's Sexually Transmitted Diseases was any use to him, I don't know, but it seems a pity that the site ( drthom.com/info/stds.htm) failed to appear in the Foreign Office's new booklet for gap-year students.
Most people in the industry will tell you that the US is still the internet superpower in the online travel market. "We're in the first half of the game of baseball in the UK," Glenn Fogel, a senior vice-president at Priceline.com, assured me. "It's several years behind the US in terms of money spent online. The UK, of course, is light years ahead of the Continent."
Admittedly, no one who's tried to find or book accommodation on a Spanish or Italian site could disagree with that. But while Americans have seized on the web as an opportunity to rent out their second homes, promote their bed and breakfasts, and share their thoughts on the quality of the powder in Aspen, the British have taken a quite different approach.
We have uploaded dozens of photos of our favourite walks and lengthy descriptions of the various Monroes bagged last summer. We have built sites dedicated to the joys of naturism. We have compiled guides to Welsh castles and shared lists of our favourite tearooms and Vendée beaches. Many of these ventures are completely uncommercial. And they put Lonely Planet's online presence to shame.
"Five years ago, everyone thought content was king," says Andrew Windsor of Lastminute.com. "Now there isn't so much content on there" - on commercial sites, that is. "But making it more personalised is going to be the key to it. I think Amazon do it really well."
Lastminute's aim is to know where you want to go before you do. "I think the whole travel industry has done a wonderful job in making the transaction easier," says Windsor. "But is it as exciting an experience as it should be? For me, the whole philosophy is to go somewhere, travelling to experience something. We want to be the online player with a personality, the one to choose when you want to do something different and try something new."
Amazon.co.uk - which, you may have noticed, is getting steadily better at recommending books and CDs - is the model. Within a few years, returning to your favoured travel site won't be unlike watching Tom Cruise being greeted as he walks into a branch of Gap in Spielberg's Minority Report. Lastminute will "know" your favourite boutique hotels or Hiltons. It will be aware you like to stopover in Dubai rather than Singapore. It will appreciate that you prefer Rough Guides to the Time Out series, and that you hate early-morning departures from Stansted.
You'll also be able to organise far more of the trip online. Customising a holiday - say, asking for an English-speaking guide for a hike in the rainforest on Monday, scuba diving tuition on Tuesday and Wednesday, and a table in a good local restaurant on Thursday - is still the preserve of the most exclusive travel agencies, such as Abercrombie & Kent. That will change. Windsor thinks the traditional resort rep may disappear altogether.
"Where [the internet] fails at the moment," concedes Soskin, "is that it can't do anything terribly complex. So, for example, if you want to go on holiday to Argentina and spend a few days in Patagonia and hire a car, and then you want to go and visit a ranch before coming back to the capital and spending a few nights there - and then you want to take a couple of internal flights: that's probably best done via a travel agency that specialises in Argentina."
The biggest losers in this vision, of course, are travel agents. "There is a feeling at the moment that the established operators in the market have not really sold the strengths of their packages very well," admits David Moesli of Atol, which protects the public from losing money or being stranded abroad because an air travel firm fails. "Holidaymakers frequently don't realise that by constructing their own packages, they are going to miss out on both financial protection and a number of other consumer benefits that could be critical if they have a problem."
"It is quite strange to me that really major companies, such as Thomas Cook or TUI, have allowed new people like Lastminute and Opodo to come in and get such a very, very large share of internet traffic," comments Soskin. "I think they're catching up now, but they've left it late in the day."
There will be a few people, of course, who deplore the urge to pre-plan every moment of their holiday. If we know too much about our destination, why bother travelling at all? And since we persist in seeking out internet cafes while we're there, and switching on our roaming-enabled mobiles, have we ever really left home behind?
"I think that knowing too much about a place you're going to, or a person you're trying to fall in love with, can be a problem," the writer and philosopher Alain de Botton writes from the US, where he is currently making a television documentary. "Often, it's a few chosen bits of information in a sea of ignorance that actually sets up the best preconditions for desire."
Would he rather have a Baedeker or an internet cafe at his disposal? "In so far as websites show us more of a place than a guidebook, I would in the end prefer a Baedeker to an internet cafe. Or, even more, a railway timetable to a Baedeker."
Readers may be relieved to hear that neither the Thomas Cook Overseas Timetable nor the Baedeker series can be read online.
Best of the net
These are the 5 websites that Guardian Unlimited Travel editor Gwyn Topham and Ros Taylor recommend every traveller should have bookmarked.
Is there anything happening anywhere that these people don't know about? There's no shortage of ideas in their huge listings database of upcoming events around the world.
Relaunched effort from the national tourist board provides great inspiration for domestic holidays. Now also extremely useful as a first-stop directory to find all types of accommodation across the nation.
You might feel like staying at home under the duvet after reading some of the more ominous warnings here; but its advice on visas, health and money is generally authoritative and up-to-date - and it virtually lays down the law as far as insurers and cancellation cover is concerned.
One of the first and still the best of the big booking sites. Claims to be the biggest online travel agent; owned by Microsoft, so no excuses if it crashes your browser.
How to make travelling with a baby or toddler a pleasure. A site designed by and built for parents, including recommended holidays and plenty of practical advice and encouragement.
