Most significantly, though, I tried to send new customers to Becky. I told my Hawaii buddies about her, and when friends came visiting from the mainland, I steered them directly to her, and they made all their neighbor island reservations --- car, hotel, and flight --- through her agency. I liked her laid-back, sleepy voice on the telephone; I appreciated her efforts to make things easy for me; and more than anything, I liked doing business with someone familiar.

But Becky blew it. To make a long story short, she passed a charge on to me for an error that she had made. Granted, it was a small charge --- only $30 --- but that made it even harder for me to accept that she didn’t just absorb it, particularly because it was the result of a major oversight on her part. When I expressed my dismay, Becky stood her ground; she insisted that it could not have been her error, though it was the second one she’d made on this particuliar reservation. And so I told her that I would take my business elsewhere.

A month later, I received word of a small windfall that would enable me to cure my rock fever with a voyage to the mainland. I almost picked up the phone to call Becky, but then I remembered our last conversation. What a terrible time to be without a travel agent!!!

Dummy! The dormant webgrrrl within me pinched my ego, hard. “What kind of self-respecting ‘Net geek are you? How could you have overlooked cyberspace, for all your travel needs?”

Of course!!! Do-it-yourself travel arrangements are a logical service for the Internet. More and more, folks are going on-line to arrange their own vacations. Becky, are you reading this?

There are a number of online reservations sites in Cyberville. You can find them under a “Travel” category in larger search engines like Magellan, Yahoo, and Lycos, or by searching on the word “travel”. I looked at, and lost patience with, a number of sites. Flifo, at www.flifo.com, promises multilingual service and foreign ticket delivery sometime in the future, but it was very vanilla, deathly slow and rather confusing. Air Travel Manager, at www.airtm.com, purports to be the only online service to offer free FedEx delivery and an automatic 5% rebate program. However, I was annoyed to find that I could not use this service unless I downloaded its software (which works only on Windows PC’s).

Microsoft’s Expedia site, at http://expedia.msn.com, is filled with busy graphics, frames, and scrolling banners. I hated it! Why? Because of those graphics, frames, and banners. And because upon registration, I was booted into something called “Agreement Between User and Microsoft”, a full-blown contract that went on forever and contained more dire warnings than a mattress tag.

The Internet Travel Network, at www.itn.net, is a gorgeous site, and, as is common to most of the large online reservations services, it provides a secure environment for payment online, and asks new users to register and create a profile of preferences --- their favorite airlines, car rental agencies, and hotel chains. ITN is a little too cute for my tastes, though. Instead of a password, you are asked for a “secret word”. Instead of being told to “press here to go to the next screen”, you are invited to press the “Open Sesame” button.

ITN claims to be “the only service on the web that lets you check travel information automatically and seamlessly route your booking to a travel agency in your area. If there is a travel agency you like anywhere in the world that is not listed on our system, please let us know.” How ‘bout that, Becky?!?

Travelocity was my next stop, at www.travelocity.com. A venture of SabreOnline, it’s probably one of the best-known full-service travel reservation websites on the ‘Net. It has a number of interesting features: a Fare-Watcher e-mail service that “keeps you informed of the very best fares available for the city pairs (round-trips) of your choice”; Flight Paging, through which information like gate changes and flight delays can be communicated to a traveller via alphanumeric pager with national access, and the availability of electronic ticketing, which eliminates a paper ticket from the process. Because of its size,Travelocity is able to offer exclusive deals on travel. When I looked, for example, a special $99 companion fare deal was available from Delta, but only if one made a reservation through Travelocity - or directly through Delta’s own nightmarish website. Ugh.

Ultimately, I was most comfortable with a service called Preview Travel, at www.previewtravel.com. Based in San Francisco, Preview Travel claims to be “the largest full-service online travel site, with more than 1.5 million subscribers and weekly online bookings of between $1.3 million and $1.5 million.”

What won me over? Was it the clean, interesting look of the site? Was it because the site offers easy, intuitive navigation through a rather complex process? Was it the automatic Best Fare Finder option, which searches for cheaper flights than I might be able to find on my own?

Nope. It was the the fact that four months’ worth of calendars are shown on each reservations page. I didn’t have to scramble for my planner, and I appreciated that Preview Travel was considerate enough to put July, August, September, and October right there where I could see them.

Becky, are you there? I booked my own 12-day vacation, including airfare, hotel, and car, on the World Wide Web. Think about your lost commission, and be nice to your clients. Otherwise, with the advent of this new technology, you may soon be out of a job.

Caroline Wright, of WRIGHT FOR YOU Word Services, is a freelance writer. A former resident of Hawaii, she now lives in rural South Carolina. Feel free to e-mail your comments to Caroline at cw@wrightforyou.com.