Clark wants you to save money in any way possible, but some areas of life pose a lot of confusion and difficulty when it comes to getting the best deal. One of these areas is travel. Clark has a background in travel, so he has biases about when he likes to use certain sites and when he prefers to use a travel agent. Just buying a simple, round-trip airline ticket, for example, using an online site is just fine. But if you have a complicated itinerary, using a travel agent is smarter. Travel agents have access to consolidator fares that will be cheaper than what you can get yourself. And, travel agents are also the way to go with cruises. Only very experienced cruisers should book on the Internet, in Clark’s opinion. So, where should you go on the Internet for airline fares? Clark has always loved SideStep, which is a “screen scraper” program. The site is sidestep.com, and it was recently voted as the best travel search engine by Smart Money magazine. Smart Money researchers priced 800 different travel itineraries, and SideStep came up with the best fare or tied for the lowest fare 96 percent of the time. The next closest was returned the lowest fare or tied for the lowest fare just over 50 percent of the time. So, SideStep is way ahead of the pack. When Clark is looking for fares, he likes to search a lot of sites because some have different features. Orbitz, for example, searches airports within 70 miles of your city. Other sites also allow you to search “windows” of travel to get the lowest fare. So, if you’re flexible on your days and times and airports, you will save tons of money. SmartMoney’s favorite site for booking hotels was quikbook.com. It is the easiest site to use and the second lowest in terms of fares. The magazine did not include Hotwire or Priceline in the survey, which surprised Clark. He uses them all the time even though they are “blind bid” sites. But, the lesson here is to try lots of options to find the best deal.