There is something about working on the web that makes people think you can either fix their computer or that it is something you made up for a joke and you really spend your time writing missives with a quill pen and strapping them to pigeons.

Sadly, my technical knowledge is akin to Basil Fawlty's car maintenance skills, but I am something of an evangelist when it comes to doing stuff online which previously required a trip to the shops. Supermarkets, bookshops, children's clothes stores and especially travel agencies go unvisited these days as I prefer to browse and buy from the discomfort of my kitchen work surface.

I discovered the unalloyed pleasure of researching and booking holidays on the web five years ago while looking for somewhere to stay on Cape Cod. Having exhausted the meagre offerings of the UK-based brochures, I tentatively revved up my extremely slow internet connection in search of local agencies and phone numbers instead. In those days it was practically impossible to book online, but the obvious advantage of broadening your horizons was immediately apparent.

The following year, we found a bargain villa through the excellent website frenchconnections.co.uk - which is a kind of clearing house for owners with homes in France to let. We found a villa in Provence for a fraction of its normal price, corresponded with the owner first via email and then by phone. It was booked it in a flurry of excitement.

It was only after the euphoria of the initial exchange that I suddenly began to worry that I had fired off a cheque for £1,000 into a complete void with no guarantee that I hadn't fallen for an elaborate hoax. But that danger is no more present than it would be responding to a classified advert in a newspaper.

The villa existed, the price was indeed a bargain and just about every holiday since has been an online exercise from start to finish. I've booked flights on the Guardian's own website (theguardian.com/travel), booked a night at Cliveden through Lastminute.com, found a great Spanish house through Vintage Travel's website (vintagetravel.co.uk), hired cottages through just about every agency known to man - or at least the UK tourist board - and looked at literally thousands of potential holiday villas through the trusty lens of the web.

The advantages of holiday ing online hardly need to be spelt out these days - you can see far more pictures of your destination, you can research around it, you can, if the site is good enough, even find a webcam to show you more detail of the surroundings. You should be able to check availability, compare prices and, on the better sites, book online with at least some assurance that your transaction will go through.

In fact using the internet is not so much a luxury these days, more a necessity. The foul blight of having to fit into a school holiday schedule means that even waiting the length of time it takes to print a brochure could rob you of your dream destination. In our first year of being obliged to holiday in August, I smugly told a colleague that I was going to book my summer break in November. He looked concerned and said, "Blimey, we booked ours in September - there won't be much left by now."

This year, we're setting off for the under-exposed Ile de Noirmoutier in the north western bit of the Vendée. Knowing where we wanted to go, but having the excellent house we had previously stayed in withdrawn from the market, the first act was to "google" the destination (google.co.uk). Yielding little that was of much use, I ventured to add the French term "vacances" to the search. Bingo.

We found a fabulous French website villasdumonde.com, which dealt in the kind of high-grade French properties you often see in vacation destinations but which are always full of, well, the French. Unfortunately, their system did not extend to offering online booking and, due to a series of largely meandering conversations between my husband and Jean-Paul in Paris, we ended up not reserving one of their fine chateaux. But one day we might.

And this is the other point about the web: if you see something you like, but it's not for now, you can bookmark it and come back to it when the time is right.

Travel websites are already transforming themselves with the advent of broadband and higher processing power. Flash presentations (the software not the adjective) are irritating and unnecessary in some cases but can give you a stronger sense of a destination when used properly. Booking flights can still be a trifle tedious, but I know few people now who don't at least look online before committing their credit card. Sites likeccheapflights.co.uk, Expedia.com and Opodo.co.uk, deliver a wide range of booking options with relative ease.

Hotels are still a tricky area, with few of the major booking aggregators likely to find you a boutique gem, but again, go to your preferred search engine - or even an excellent travel site, such as theguardian.com/travel - look at the hotel pages and almost all entries these days will have a site.

I have started to formulate a theory that the quality of a website is usually in direct proportion to the quality of a destination. And I don't just mean graphics and whimsical soundtracks - the site that can offer you a three-dimensional tour and online availability will probably not be the front organisation for a fleapit with hot and cold running cockroaches. There are still a few snooty brochure operators who think it is "classy" not to have a website - but they are wrong and I wish a plague on their overpriced houses.

And, of course, the crowning glory of the internet holiday is that you can book it at perilously short notice. As an academic exercise, I swept the net for holiday alternatives three days before depar ture for my own summer holidays. On half a dozen websites showing villa and hotel availability, I picked up alternatives which would have been perfectly acceptable - and a couple which had over £500 knocked off the price. Just limiting the search to French villas, I found a handful on the swanky balfourtravel.co.uk, which had villas at over £1,000 a week,and, at a more modest budget, the options on indiv-travellers.co.uk still had plenty of availability.

This article does, however, carry a health warning: for some of us the obsession of finding the perfect holiday online has become an addiction that is hard to control. I know it's time to take a break when, instead of rooting through the day's news on our site, I find myself wandering through family-travel.co.uk or elegantresorts.co.uk (for out-of-reach comedy value only). The false idea that the next hit could be the perfect destination is the most compulsive drug I know of - and twice as expensive.

Best of the net

Holiday deals

virgintravelstore.com
Voted the best booking service by Guardian readers this year, this site has an irresistible combination of a speedy search, clear information up front, brilliant detail and all-important online discounts.

lastminute.com
The great dotcom survivor is easy to use and offers good products: not always the cheapest but a quick and reliable way to organise your city break/romantic weekend.

somewhere2stay.com
Once you've tracked down that cheap charter flight, this site forms an ideal complement: stacks of matching Mediterranean accommodation, with late offers to the fore.

bargainholidays.com
For quick trawls of the package holiday bargain basement. Claims to be the biggest online database of late deals - though you have to pick up the phone at the end and the prices aren't necessarily confirmed until you do.

· See also: travelocity.co.uk, thomascook.com.

Villas

holidayrentals.co.uk
From Argentina to Wales: over 6,000 villas, cottages, chalets, chateaux, farmhouses and flats to rent direct from their owners, and an excellent little search engine.

villarama.com
Great for last-minute deals and cheaper villas near the coast.

frenchconnections.co.uk
Welcoming site specialising in French properties.

bookthat.com
Easy-to-use Europe specialist which is expanding into the Caribbean and New England.

greatrentals.com
Cabins, condos, chalets and villas to rent from their owners in every state of the US.

· See also: For France, try the sites the French use: abritel.fr and gites-de-france.fr/eng/ (both are available in English).
Gwyn Topham & Ros Taylor