For travel junkies, booking your own itinerary might seem like a way of life, but for many “average joes”, it is actually quite a daunting task. If you fall into this latter category, have no fear. Booking your own travel can be quite simple if you know your way around a few websites and have a good idea of what you want.

The most important element in booking a comfortable flight is knowing what you want. Odds are, if you are an experienced business or corporate traveler, you already know that, which gives you a distinct advantage. Before you begin, you should sit down with a piece of paper or a blank computer document and make a couple of lists as follows:

1) Things I hate about flying
2) What comforts are important to me when flying
3) Which is most important to me (list in order from most to least important):
duration of flight, number of stops/layovers, price of ticket, airline, class of seat, depature/arrival time

Once you have these lists, you can begin your search with a firm idea of what you want to find. The first order of business is to choose two or three airline booking sites. While most people tend to start at an actual airline’s website, these are usually the highest priced fares, as most booking sites purchase bulk tickets from airlines and offer their savings on to the individual passenger.

Once you’re looking at your booking site of choice, go ahead and enter your desired date of travel, origin and destination cities. If you are hoping to use the most convenient route possible, enter your hometown and the city where you are headed. If one or neither has a major airport, use the nearest large airport in another city. Click submit and await the results.

Now you’ve got the search results in a list of flights available. Go back to list number 3 that you made – your preferences listed in order from most to least important. Looking at the top of your flight search results, most websites show a variety of sorting options, including airline, price, duration of flight, etc. Choose the radial button that is most important to you and sort your results by that preference.

Once your results are sorted, take a quick scan of every result from top to bottom. Maybe now you’ve noticed that the duration of the flight is shorter (if that was your #1 preference), but the price is too high. Try resorting by price to see what the cheapest options are, to give yourself a good idea about how cheap the price can go. Bear in mind that cheaper flights tend to have more stops and longer layovers.

If you see a flight option that looks attractive, check for a small link somewhere in the flight listing that says “Details” or “Itinerary” or “More Information”. Clicking this link will give you a detailed set of information about the flight, including all layovers and stops, which cities/airports the itinerary has you traveling through, the departure and arrival times and flight duration, type of jet and more. These can all be deciding factors in the comfort of your flight, so check the small details to make sure you are getting exactly what you want.

If not, start your search over using different search terms. You might want to modify your search based on departure time, airline or layovers. If you desire a direct flight with no stops, look for a check box on the search homepage that says “Only non-stops” or similar. You may have to click “Advanced search” to find this box, and using the advanced search feature can be useful in customizing many other details of your search, such as business and first-class seats, as well.