In a fit of DIY determination, JOHN HARRIS decided to use the Internet to book a five-week holiday to the US and discovered the high price of his over-exuberance.

Travel agents really do earn their money.

Last year, emboldened by the ease of booking flights to Sydney with airline websites, I decided to book our family's five-week trip to the US and Canada by myself.

After all, I rationalised, all the tools are there to construct a do-it-yourself odyssey: Detail-rich travel websites, online booking systems and low-cost Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone calls in case I had to actually talk with a human.

Several months later, I had hand-knitted an amazing meander through North America - and, in the process, thoroughly convinced myself that travel agents earn every cent of their fees.

My first step was to book airfares to and from Los Angeles, including a stopover in Hawaii to break up the return journey. Although Qantas has its own site at www.qantas.com, I decided to use a multi-airline site, Webjet www.webjet.com to compare available fares.

Webjet's simple interface allowed me to enter the required destination and travel dates and then select the available airlines, from the cheapest to the stratospherically expensive.  Eventually the best fares were from Qantas.

Next was to organise internal travel for our stay. To avoid driving a car on the wrong side of the road, we decided to travel by train, which in the US is spelt Amtrak.

In many ways, Amtrak is a throwback to another century - not necessarily the 20^th - with its lumbering engines, its lack of modern communications aboard the train and timetables that can run from more than an hour late to 45 minutes early in the course of an overnight journey.

Amtrak's online booking system www.amtrak.com was a rather balkanised process: While I could book two-week US Rail passes online, I had to phone the Amtrak Call Centre to book sleeper upgrades for overnight trips.

I was greeted by "Julie", an automated call agent that coped admirably with my Australian accent to direct me to the right department.

Things slowed down after that: Booking the upgrades took more than 60 minutes on the phone - fortunately, this cost only $3.52 due to my VoIP phone service.

Booking an Ottawa to Las Vegas airfare with United Airlines www.united.com was a much simpler process: I compared available flights and fares, and even chose my preferred seats, in a few minutes.

Using the Internet as a virtual travel agent really comes into its own when choosing accommodation, assisted by travel advice sites such as TripAdvisor.

I chose the area of a city we wanted to stay in, such as the French Quarter in New Orleans, and then used www.tripadvisor.com to look for hotels.

Reviews from previous visitors, especially about whether hotels were family-friendly, helped to form my opinions. While an occasional grumble was okay, a sustained wail of complaints was the kiss of death for a hotel.

Once I had a shortlist, I'd call the hotel to questions receptionists to check out if the promised courteous culture was borne out in person.

As a result, we ended up staying at great hotels in Hollywood, New York and the Grand Canyon with consistently helpful staff, an invaluable commodity on a long trip.

However, was my DIY itinerary worth the effort of putting it together? Absolutely not, if you place any value on your time!

I probably spent more than 50 hours over several months working my way through websites, discovering dead ends and untangling the overlap between online and telephone booking processes.

However this hands-on approach provided fantastic foreplay for a fabulous holiday.

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia. You can view his website at www.johnharris.net.au

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