You’re visiting Uncle Naguib in New York and decide to see Cousin Lydia in Los Angeles. Your plans in Paris fell through, so you want to hit the mall in Milan instead. Or, heaven forbid, you miss your flight in Cairo and have less than 36 hours to catch your connector in London. We’re a culture of last-minute planning, which is not usually helpful when trying to get a decent airline fare.

Conventional wisdom says that earlier is better for finding good departure deals or sales, and that’s mostly true when dealing directly with an airline’s website or a live travel agent. But as the departure date approaches, unsold seats are made available to discount travel websites – and that’s where you should start looking for cheap last-minute fares.

Be flexible. Shifting your departure date can score a lower fare. The website farecast.live.com offers predictions for which dates will have low fares in the coming month, but only for North American departures. The site farecompare.com is packed with travel tips such as the cheapest days to fly (Wednesdays) and the best times to search for deals (Tuesdays).

Land outside the box. Many major cities have more than one airport within a two-hour drive, and budget airlines often use the smaller one. Check for the option “include nearby airports” on your search engine.

Check the fine print. Some European websites post the pre-tax fare, with a fine-print link to the actual price. The airline may be selling that seat for LE 200, but after airport fees and the government’s share, that ticket is closer to LE 800. Look for the magic phrase “including fees and taxes.”

Call the airline. You may not be able to buy your tickets online if your departure is within 24 hours of booking. When you find a good fare, call the airline directly at either its national reservations line, airport customer service desk or local general sales agent. Ask if the airline will honor the price listed online or if it offers one close. Be warned: You may have to make a trip to the local airline office to actually buy the ticket: Egyptair, for example, will not make a ticket reservation over the phone for a departure within four days.

It is always worth doing a price search online, just to limit your options. The Cairo-London scenario is based on a true story: The best fare found was on lastminute.com for an Egyptair flight leaving in 14 hours. We confirmed the rate with an airline’s National Call Center representative, then went to the airport to buy the ticket from the customer service desk. The savings? A replacement ticket with the original carrier would have been about LE 6,800; the last-minute fare found online was about LE 2,250 — and my panic-stricken friend made her next flight on time.

We looked at 30 online travel reservation websites, plugging in three different itineraries: Cairo-London, Paris-Milan and New York-Los Angeles, with a departure date two days from the time of research. Our recommendations are based on user-friendliness and comprehensiveness of results, not on which site offered the best price.

lastminute.com: defaults to UK departures; select “non UK departures” in pulldown menu. Shows fares for alternate dates in a tab after your search.

farecast.com: has a good filter to sort results, and graphs predicting low fares for US departures.

kayak.com: searches 140+ sites, comprehensive filters narrow initial results. A fare history chart shows price trends.

sidestep.com: interface and results identical to kayak.com

farecompare.com: offers travel tips on home page and alternate destination deals based on departure city. Also contacts up to five search engines with your itinerary.

expedia.com: a standard for sites searching multiple engines.

travelocity.co.uk: can handle Cairo departures, good results for intra-Europe flights.

orbitz.com: good for US and European flights, no Cairo departures.

cheaptickets.com: good for US and European flights, no Cairo departures.

hotwire.com: only handles North American flights, but shows the best rates within 30 days of your departure.

priceline.com: filter quickly sorts your results, allows one day leeway in travel dates, suggests other deals on results page.

travelocity.com: returns better US-based fares than the international Travelocity sites.

Some websites let you send your itinerary details to multiple travel search sites at once. Results from each site appear in a pop-up window: fine for a 17-inch screen, but maddening on the BlackBerry.

bookingbuddy.com: Contacts up to 11 search engines; only three useful for Cairo departures and eight useful for intra-Europe flights.

igougo.com: Contacts nine sites; three useful for Cairo departures, six useful for Europe. et