Holiday Travel Planning Help on the Web

I hate to be the bearer of obvious, stress-inducing news, but the holidays are closing in—especially if you're planning to travel during them to see family and friends. It's time to secure travel reservations, and the web is full of travel tools to help.

The folks at Farecast say the more leeway you have on which day you travel, the better shot you'll have at decent fares.  Which leads to the first travel tip ....

Be flexible: Farecast chart pictured shows that traveling Friday and Saturday during Christmas will yield higher ticket prices. It's not ideal, but if you travel on the holiday, you'll find lower fares, too. Travel deals for Thanksgiving are getting harder to find, but Farecast says if you're flexible on return dates, extending the holiday to Monday, or Tuesday, you could find lower fares.

Work the web: The web is full of travel sites that provide a variety of tools to follow certain flights and troll for the lowest fares. So don't just use one. Farecast is a good travel site to check for airfares because of its unique feature that predicts whether fares are on the rise, static, or, best of all, declining, to help you decide whether to lock into a fare. But there are lots of other great travel sites to check for fares, too. Some of the best: Expedia, Kayak, lowestfare, Cheaptickets, Travelocity, Orbitz, and Yahoo! Travel.

Sign up for alerts: Some of the travel sites have tools that allow you to get alerts about price drops on routes and specific flights. Yapta is one. So are Farecompare, Bestfares, Airfarewatchdog, and Farecast.

Let us know which sites you've had the best luck with to find good deals at peak travel times, if there is such a thing.