People have obviously all already addressed the fact that we called the airlines directly (finding their phone number in the phone book!), but what I think is bananas is that I spent several years on exchange in Europe during the 96-99 range. Online sources were in early development, and I can remember backpacking around with two books— one with a complete list of all train schedules for all European cities, and one a guidebook geared toward college-aged kids showing maps to and phone numbers for hotels. We’d literally ride into a new city, get off the train, use the map in the book to find a hotel, and then go ask if they had a room. If not, we’d move to the next one on the list. Somehow this worked just fine, but looking back, WTF