The challenge is simple: to undercut the price of a tour operator ski package by organising the trip myself. If any of the hype about the 'low-cost' airlines is true, then surely if I book in September I'll have half a chance of success.

I work out my ideal holiday. I pick a top resort - Val d'Isère - and a week when conditions should be good, the second week in February, just before the half-term holiday in most of the UK. I want a good hotel - say three-star - that's well located. I reach for the brochure of market leader, Crystal. The Hotel Les Sorbiers looks perfect, a modern hotel built in traditional style, five minutes from the chairlifts, 'fully refurbished' for this season. Crystal's price: £715 b&b for seven nights, including flights, transfers and accommodation, based on two people sharing a room.

Now I know my target price, I try to beat it. I aim to book flights, transport to the resort, and the same hotel, on the same dates, and based on two travelling together. Armed with my laptop, phone, cup of coffee and pack of chocolate biscuits, I launch myself on to the internet.

Within three minutes, I strike lucky: returns to Chambéry with Buzz at a civilised time, for £141.65. I click on to the 'build your own ski trip' icon, and end up on a site for Budget car hire. It tells me I have to enter my flight number to get a quote. Damn. I begin my Buzz search all over again to get the info - travelling out on 8 February on UK 2712 at 11.25, and back on 15 February on UK 2713 at 15.00 - and start from scratch again with Budget. 'Sorry but those dates are unavailable at this location, please try again,' it tells me. I try some other dates. Same reply. I phone, and the agent tells me to 'call back in about four weeks, when the rates have been loaded on to the system'. So much for trying to book early; 25 minutes in and I've already hit a dead end.

I settle on a new plan that should be more efficient. I'll research every possible option, stage by stage, and keep notes as I go. First: flights. Any of the airports in the South East suit me. I go back online and find that three of the no-frills airlines offer services to handy airports, all between 130km and 220km from Val d'Isère: Buzz to Chambéry, Grenoble and Geneva; Go to Lyon; and easyJet to Geneva.

I note down all the convenient options. As well as Chambéry, Buzz offers me Grenoble for £113.30 and Geneva for £133.30. Go's best offer is £107.30 for a return to Lyon, but the 7am departure puts me off. EasyJet flies only to Geneva, but has the busiest schedule by far: 10 flights from Luton and six from Gatwick, at a range of prices. Best, for a combination of price and convenience, is the 12.40 out from Luton, 18.00 return, for £120.

So far, this all seems pretty easy: one-and- a-half hours after starting, I've got several flight options working out at £150 or less. But I also feel disappointed: this isn't the fabulous deal I expected. Out of a choice of 24 flights in all each way, the small number of combinations that come in at under £100 have me arriving in Val d'Isère either after midnight or leaving on the last day before 4am. The cheapest possible combination of flights - £80 with EasyJet, flying out of Luton - involves a midnight arrival, and a departure the following Saturday at around 2.30am. So much for 'low cost'.

Now for transfers. I do a search with Google for the tourist office site and find the links to the airports and coach connections. The Lyon coach website is 'under construction', Geneva's still carries last year's timetables, and Chambéry offers no info at all. I hit the phone. The Lyon office, according to an answerphone message, is closed for three weeks; Chambéry says they won't know until the end of October; and Geneva says they will publish prices in a month. The man at the airport bus company says last year the transfers cost about £32 one-way. I reckon for a party of two it's not worth the hassle; after all, we could end up waiting at the airport for hours.

The Buzz 'build your own ski trip' icon also links to a transfer company, Airport Transfer Services, which offers private and shared minibus transfers. Annoyingly, it won't tell me a price until I've entered all my personal details, including email address and phone number, and made a full booking. Then the price pops up: return to Val d'Isère from Chambéry £190 each, from Geneva, £220. No thanks.

So, after a frustrating 40 minutes on transfers, it looks as though car hire is the solution. Best of several deals I come across seems to be with easyCar.com, which I find on the EasyJet site: a small Merc from £97 for seven days. This looks promising - at first. Then it tells me I can choose not to clean the car myself for an extra £10. Hmmm. The excess turns out to be £500. Way too high. It tells me I can pay extra to bring the figure down. I search for ages - the extra sum isn't quoted. Eventually, I discover that I have to make the booking - including supplying all drivers' names and ages - before it will give me a quote. I give up.

Much easier is the Holiday Autos site. It gives me a quote straight away: £134 for a Peugeot 106 from any of the four airports, and a sensible excess. I reckon between £30 and £40 should cover the petrol, add about £15 for hiring snow chains - say £95 each, all-in. For the flight, I settle for the £120 return to Geneva with EasyJet - its busy timetable is reassuring, in case of a delay. Transport, then, is £215 each.

So now to sorting out the hotel. This turns out to be easier than I expected. I log onto the Val d'Isère tourist office website, click on accommodation, key in my chosen week, and within seconds have a list of hotel prices.

And there it is, the rate for the Hotel Les Sorbiers, quoted per person per day: €99 b&b, plus €0.84 tourist tax - about £461 per week. So, with my transport cost of £215 per person, the total for the holiday comes to £676 per person.

Compared to the package price of £715, that's a saving of £39. (Out of interest, I work out the cost for the only other three-star in the Crystal brochure, the Mercure. This is £27 more expensive DIY.) I'm quite pleased with myself. OK, so it has taken me three hours and 40 minutes, and I've got a headache from all the coffee and staring at the computer screen, but I reckon a second time I could do it much faster.

Out of curiosity, I glance at some other brochures. I'm astonished to find that Inghams offers the same hotel at the same dates - for £629. That's £47 cheaper still than my DIY price. And I'm not stuck with hideous flight times: I can avoid the 06.45 charter by paying a £5 surcharge: 9.15 from Gatwick with Britannia, or 15.20 from Stansted with Monarch. Or I could pay £29 and fly scheduled with Swiss from Heathrow at 09.50. I'd still be undercutting my own laboriously researched holiday by £18.

Was it worth it? In this case, no. I'd have better spent my time researching package prices. Would I bother again? Only if I travelled in a bigger group and could bring down the cost per person of car hire. So, if I can't score a bargain with the no-frills airlines by shopping around five months in advance, what hope is there later in the season?