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The foibles of Internet travel

February 16, 2004 |

People complain that most travel sites are specific to residents of a particular country or do not accept foreign credit cards.

Road warriors are suckers for technology. And it often seems that people who run travel sites are following W.C. Fields’s infamous dictum, “Never give a sucker an even break.”

The Internet is great, if you are looking for more information than you need. And booking on line can be fine for straightforward itineraries, if you can find the right site in a jungle of options. People complain that most travel sites are specific to residents of a particular country or do not accept foreign credit cards. Why, they ask pitifully, do we spend chunks of precious time trawling sites that are hard to navigate, being led down cul-de-sacs through a gauntlet of flashing ads only to have to log-off and start all over, or have the computer freeze?

I was intrigued to come across “Online Travel,” a survey published in January by Shelley Taylor Associates, an international management consulting firm, of 46 Internet travel sites (22 North American, 17 British, and 7 “European” - representing 11 travel agencies, 13 airlines, 12 hotels and 10 car rental firms). Sites were analyzed from October to December, 2003, and rated according to some 800 criteria that included “navigation,” “home page,” “pre-sale assistance,” “travel resources” (maps, weather and guides), “product information,” “post-transaction communication” and “account management.”

Conclusion: U.S. sites are much better than British ones. The top five sites are American (Expedia, Travelocity, Hilton, Orbitz and Continental Airlines); the bottom five (in descending order of badness) are British (Flybe, Ryan Air, Bridge-the-World, Holiday Autos and Travel Bag). The best agency site is Expedia; the best airline site, Continental; the best hotel site, Hilton, and the best car rental site, Hertz (U.K.).

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