Travel booking woes

I'm heading off to the DLD conference in Munich later this month and needed to book a flight and hotel. I started off looking, as I normally do, at lastminute.com but then had an e-mail through from ebookers.com so thought I'd give them a try.
At lunchtime yesterday I thought I'd been successful using the ebookers online system. But it didn't like me for some reason and refused to take my booking.
I gave it another go at just before 5.00pm - the same thing happened. I spotted that there's a phone number to call, so I rang and after the five or six button presses I got through to a travel agent in India.
I explained what had happened and she said "it's always better to ring and speak to someone". I was rather surprised as I thought online travel agents worked, well, online. Anyway, she went through the booking and I gave my credit card details. She read back the flight information and I said "hang on a tick - that's the wrong flight back". She'd managed to get me on a far earlier flight than I wanted, so she had to try and change this (which involved talking to a supervisor and making me hold on longer). By this time, I'd been on the phone for 26 minutes. She came back and told me it was now all right - but then couldn't get her system to finalise the booking, just as I hadn't.
I was pretty frustrated by now, particularly as I had to go and collect my son from school and was now late. So I told the agent to cancel it all.
Later that evening, I went onto lastminute.com and booked what I wanted and got confirmation within about 2'30".
Moral - stick with the people you know!