Travelling in Britain nowadays feels akin to highway robbery. Air fares are going up — and may do so again thanks to the new green levy — and so are train fares. You can’t escape in your car either; road tax and fuel duty are also on the rise. It’s enough to make you want to stay at home.

But the web can help. Online there are a variety of ways for you to get the best fare possible. For instance, buying tickets for individual legs of the journey (believe it or not, two single trips rather than a return are sometimes cheaper), or simply finding the cheapest fare. And you can make similar savings on all manner of transport options — from the lowest petrol prices to car shares.

TRAINS

South West Trains, which ferries nearly half a million travellers every day, recently announced an increase of up to 20% on fares. These rises come into force next month, but savvy commuters can avoid paying full whack by visiting www.megatrain.com.

This site is owned by Stagecoach, the same company that operates South West Trains. Stagecoach is trying to promote Megatrain as a separate budget brand and is offering cut-price tickets and a wider range of fares. A single from Exeter to Waterloo, for example, is £8 instead of the £22.40 offered at www.southwesttrains.co.uk/SWTrains.

These offers aren’t available on all routes, and Megatrain doesn’t yet list fares postMay 20 (when the increases come in). However, the company claims that tickets will still be available more cheaply here.

There are a number of other wheezes that all rail passengers can use to save money on fares, and the superb site www.seat61.com gives a good breakdown. Among the best is buying tickets for different legs of a single journey.

For example www.nationalrail.co.uk quotes £123.80 as the best fare for Newport, south Wales, to Edinburgh, but you can do it for £69 if you buy tickets for Newport-Crewe and then Crewe-Edinburgh.

You can shave £17 off a trip from London to Alnmouth, Northumberland, if you buy tickets for London-Stevenage and Stevenage-Alnmouth (£79.50 instead of £96.60), and at www.thetrainline.com, buying two singles between Euston and Wilmslow is £10.50 cheaper than the £57.50 saver return. The site’s link to “slower cheaper routes” is also worth a detour, while www.gner.co.uk gives 10% off its lowest advance fares when you book online.

BUS

Coaches are no longer the downmarket alternative they used to be: www.thekingsferry.co.uk is working hard to deliver a service worthy of the name (and you have to love a site that calls its buses “land yachts”). Its commuter service from Medway to London is £15 return, while www.oxfordtube.com is a London-Oxford coach service (single £12, return £14) offering extra legroom and power points for laptops. www.nationalexpress.com offers £1 inter-city fun fares that are available only online, but searching for them is no fun — you can’t search by £1 fare, only by date and destination and hope you hit one. Alongside Megatrain, Stagecoach also run a cut-price bus service called www.megabus.com, which offers journeys between cities for as little as £1 (plus 50p booking fee).

PLANES

Flyers looking for a bargain have never had it so good, thanks to the multitude of search engines, and flight comparison sites that find the cheapest fares for you.

Although no single site emerges top for everything, www.kayak.co.uk is among the best.

It has some great features, such as a slide control that shows how changing the flight time affects the price, and “best fare” options for forthcoming weekends. It also searches all the flights from all the airports in a major city — when a site does not do this it can be tedious.

If you are flexible about dates, both www.skyscanner.net and www.momondo.com present a whole month’s worth of fares to a particular destination (including tax) in a bar chart, making a brilliant at-a-glance guide to when it is cheapest to fly (though if you want to check a specific date, Skyscanner can be laborious).

Do be aware that many of these sites don’t take account of excess luggage charges brought in by many airlines recently.

CARS

How far would you go to save money on petrol? Put your postcode into www.petrolprices.com and you can access the price at virtually every pump in the country.

Unlike sites such as www.bagnall.co.uk/taxigas and www.whatprice.co.uk, which rely on the goodwill of road users to update the information, Petrol Prices gleans its data from Catalist, the UK’s petrol station monitor, which keeps an up-to-date and reliable nationwide database of forecourt prices.

You have to sign up to get the specific locations, but it’s a simple, free service that produces instant results. According to Whatprice, the national average for unleaded petrol is 88.9p.

If you’re thinking of taking your car out of the country, then head to www.ferryoffers.co.uk, which claims to offer up to 60% savings on fares. Routes include Dover-Calais, Holyhead-Dublin and PortsmouthSt Malo.

LIFT SHARE AND CAR HIRE

What with talk of a national road user charging scheme and the increasing cost of the London congestion charge, you may be tempted to leave your car at home.

Why not try car sharing? Not only can you save on petrol, but you will also help reduce congestion. The sharing website www.liftshare.org boasts 150,000 members nationwide and it’s easy to find a lift for one-off or regular trips. Tap in the details of your journey and the site will put you in touch with a solution.

If you’re looking to hire a car, then head to www.vroomvroomvroom.co.uk, which compares prices from many of the leading UK car hire firms, including Hertz and Avis. Not only will this save you money, but it means you can choose the company that offers a drop-off point closest to your home — saving you a long schlep back on public transport.