ITHACA, N.Y. -- If you are looking for the best hotel room deal and are confused by what is out there on the Internet, a new study points the way to the best prices and the most up-to-date information on available rooms.

The study's authors are Gary Thompson, a professor at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration and director of its Center for Hospitality Research (CHR), and Alexandra Failmezger, a graduate student at the Hotel School. Their study, "Why Customers Shop Around: A Comparison of Hotel Room Rates and Availability Across Booking Channels," is posted online and is accessible at no charge to those who sign up at the CHR Web site: http://www.chr.cornell.edu.

The study found that hotel chains have made considerable progress in fulfilling their goal of offering lowest-cost last-room availability on their own Web sites, in competition with sites operated by third parties Travelocity, Orbitz and Expedia. However, a check of 137 possible booking dates in four different hotel market types -- luxury, upscale, mid-market and budget -- also revealed that the third-party providers, notably Travelocity, still frequently offer the lowest rate. In addition, booking on a hotel chain's Web site or a third party's Web site yields lower rates than telephoning the hotel, the study showed.

But telephoning the hotel is the best way to get accurate room availability (calling the hotel turned up available rooms 95.6 percent of the time) -- followed by consulting hotel-chain Web sites (which turned up available rooms 94.2 percent of the time). Third-party Web sites, on the other hand, did dismally, reporting in many instances that rooms at a given rate weren't available, when they actually were. Under that measure, Expedia was the poorest performer, failing to list a property or reporting no available rooms 29.2 percent of the time.

The study's findings demonstrate the relative consistency of the hotel chains' own Web sites in offering customers the lowest rates, say the researchers. But customers who shop around may find even lower rates on some third-party sites.

Thompson and Failmezger caution that their study had a relatively small sample. Also, it only used data from single-night bookings and didn't necessarily reflect the market shares of all chains or the way customers shop for rooms. Hotel room bookings via the Web are constantly evolving, but the study's results are significant enough for the researchers to recommend that hotel chains work to maintain consistent room rates across all booking channels, including third-party Web sites, so that price becomes less of a consideration in customers' booking decisions -- and loyalty-reward programs for returning to the same hotel-chain properties become more attractive for customers.