Many travel Web sites closely related

If you’ve tried to book a hotel room online lately, you may have noticed something strange:

All the prices seem the same.

The nasty secret? Many big travel Web sites that appear to be competitors actually are closer kin than the Clampetts.

They’re kissing cousins. Back door buddies. Partners to their advantage, not necessarily yours.

Take Orbitz.com. Cendant Corp. said last month it would buy it. Cendant owns Avis and Budget rental car companies. But it also owns the travel Web sites www.cheaptickets.com and www.lodging.com, Orbitz’s supposed rivals.

Go on all three sites looking for a hotel room in Milwaukee, and each turns up the same Hyatt Regency deal at or near the top for $102.71 per night.

Then there’s www.travelocity.com.

Its family ties would make a genealogist swoon. American Airlines (AMR) owns the computer travel reservations network Sabre. Sabre owns Travelocity. Travelocity owns Site 59. Site 59 powers last-minute vacation deals for not only Travelocity but also for competitors Orbitz and Yahoo Travel.

That makes me queasy.

And, hmm, Travelocity’s price for the Hyatt in Milwaukee is also $102.71.

You getting a bargain hunter’s headache yet?

With 30 percent of U.S. adults now using the Internet to help plan travel and 45 million people actually booking travel online, we all like to get a deal. But looking at travel Web sites is like looking at six sides of the same cube.

Take www.expedia.com. It’s owned by InteractiveCorp – a company that also owns the big travel Web sites www.hotels.com and www.hotwire.com.

Expedia offers a room at the Hyatt for $103, a whopping 19 cents more than the other sites.

Yahoo Travel seems independent, except that its hotel searches are powered by – aha! – competitor Travelocity. It quotes the identical price.

Mystery shopper site www.priceline.com may seem to stand alone. But the company also owns www.lowestfare.com and www.travelweb.com. In our make-believe Milwaukee hotel search, both put the Hyatt identically at the top of their lists for the same $102.71 a night. That is either the most amazing coincidence since Dorothy’s house landed on the Wicked Witch of the West or a cause for skepticism.

What’s going on? Interwoven ownership can’t explain it all.

Blame it on a second development at work here: crabby hotel chains.

Chains have been losing $1 billion a year to the online travel discounters by selling them rooms too cheaply and letting them mark them up 25 percent to 40 percent to consumers.

Many chains are now enforcing minimum pricing that guarantees no Web site will undercut their own.

In this case, it’s true. When I called the Hyatt in Milwaukee, the clerk quoted a price of $124 after taxes for that same night. It sounds high, until you add the taxes and service charges to the Web sites’ amazingly popular $102.71 rate, which causes the actual price to rise to $120 to $123.

Luckily, the Hyatt’s own Web site, www.hyatt.com, had something better. Including taxes, its online rate was $113.45. What a deal. Or did it only seem like one compared with the other prices?

A new J.D. Power and Associates survey of customer satisfaction shows that travelers who book rooms directly through a hotel’s Web site are most satisfied with their experiences. Sure enough, I was happier already – and I wasn’t even really going to Milwaukee.

This does not mean you should stop using the big travel Web sites. Many offer good prices on vacation packages. They also can still cut deals with independent hotels. I’ve used Travelocity reliably for years. I booked a Paris trip on Expedia. I once got a deal of $69 a night at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago through Priceline.

The government hasn’t accused any of these companies of violating antitrust regulations in spite of all the kissy-kissy relations. Why? Because so far it hasn’t found anything to suggest it’s hurt consumers.

There is even a new generation of meta-search engines that let you search a universe of travel deals. Competitors Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity have teamed up on www.kayak.com. Yahoo Travel is testing www.farechase.com. (It’s good; check it out.)

There are www.mobissimo.com, www.travelzoo.com and www.sidestep.com, juicy properties that likely will be snapped up by a bigger shark in the pond soon.

But for hotels, Peter Greenberg, author of “Hotel Secrets from the Travel Detective” (Villard, $14.95), says you may be able to get the best deal on a hotel by checking all the online prices, then calling the property directly to bargain.

Personal contact? Amid the thicket of kissing-cousin market forces, it sounds just crazy enough to work.