I'm from Texas, so I use one of these types of sites about three or four times a year to make trips home or to relatives. All in all this is one of the most cluttered and annoying to look at sites I've seen. The basic formula of "info on left, select in middle, enter account, done" remains the same, but the amount of just plain unnecessary stuff they try and throw at you over and over really starts to annoy.
From a crap perspective, it's not too shabby. It seems to line up pretty well, and there is consistency in where things are place,at least in terms of header, and then left-middle-right content. The different main points seem to stand out fairly well on the home page as well, having nice headers for each small boxed section so it's easy to know what it is you are looking at. It's the overall amount of information thrown at the customer that gets annoying, however, and with the lack of a real "get back" feature as stated above (below?), it makes finding out "oh, I really did want that spa treatment/aromatherapy while I'm on my business trip" a hassle in the end, making you decide against it.
I tried, for fun, to use the business travel section just to see if there would be any differences, but sadly, when booking a flight, it takes you to the same screen every time. A selection for "I just want a flight, damnit" would have been nice, but since they probably make their money off the advertisements of hotels, rental car agencies, and small attractions of the town able to pay for the ad space, it makes sense from their perspective.
One of the biggest problems I had, however, was the inability to get an advanced search from the homepage, but then after the search they add multiple options, from time of departure to airline to number of stops. That, mixed with the addition of "we'll show you a nice price but it's about 100$ more when you're done" policies on taxes and baggage costs when showing the total for the trip kind of dampens the excitement of going on a trip for me.
They can keep their rental car deals, I think I'm going travelocity. Gnomes are cooler, anyway.
-Sean
From a crap perspective, it's not too shabby. It seems to line up pretty well, and there is consistency in where things are place,at least in terms of header, and then left-middle-right content. The different main points seem to stand out fairly well on the home page as well, having nice headers for each small boxed section so it's easy to know what it is you are looking at. It's the overall amount of information thrown at the customer that gets annoying, however, and with the lack of a real "get back" feature as stated above (below?), it makes finding out "oh, I really did want that spa treatment/aromatherapy while I'm on my business trip" a hassle in the end, making you decide against it.
I tried, for fun, to use the business travel section just to see if there would be any differences, but sadly, when booking a flight, it takes you to the same screen every time. A selection for "I just want a flight, damnit" would have been nice, but since they probably make their money off the advertisements of hotels, rental car agencies, and small attractions of the town able to pay for the ad space, it makes sense from their perspective.
One of the biggest problems I had, however, was the inability to get an advanced search from the homepage, but then after the search they add multiple options, from time of departure to airline to number of stops. That, mixed with the addition of "we'll show you a nice price but it's about 100$ more when you're done" policies on taxes and baggage costs when showing the total for the trip kind of dampens the excitement of going on a trip for me.
They can keep their rental car deals, I think I'm going travelocity. Gnomes are cooler, anyway.
-Sean
No comments:
Post a Comment