Expedi-...uhhh.......

Hello all,

So I'm playing around with Expedia, as per our assignment, and I'm sort of writing this as I go, so we'll discover all sorts of goodies together.

First, I saw there are a ton of options when you first open the page. In fact, there are multiple ways to do everything. The altered color/design leads one to the "Build Your Trip" panel, which is good. In this frame, though, there's still an overload of options.

Each radio button has it's own set of controls and options, and the entire area changes in size/organization in accordance to what you want to do. For a first-time user/zero-time reserver, it was incredibly obnoxious. I've never reserved flights, or anything, really, so I'm looking for something simple I'm being forced to read every little field and every little button, and it's pretty obnoxious.

So my first inclination is to check out the Activities in Rochester, NY, because I enjoy being cynical. I put in some arbitrary dates (10/13-10/21), and it returned nothing. So I thought "well, this is Rochester....let's give it more time" and selected 10/13-1/1/09....still nothing. Okay, my next thought is to go for a bigger city. Say, San Diego. Still nothing. Las Vegas? No. NYC? Nope. What's the point in having a search feature that never returns any results?

Okay, so enough harassing the system. Time to go for the big guns: Flight + Hotel + Car. We're going on vacation! Rochester to Las Vegas 12/22-1/1/09. Sounds like a great time. 1 Room with 0 Adults, 0 Seniors, and 0 Children. Wait, what? Well, it let me do it, so why not.

After an inordinate amount of time searching, I have results. They're arbitrarily sorted by "Expedia Picks", which is okay. I click on "Price" and it has to re-calculate something in order to display the choices in order of (ascending) price. Obnoxious, but we'll let it slide. I've been given prices, but I'm not really sure what they entail? I've just been given a price associated to a hotel. What about flight? What about car?

So I decide to bite the bullet and click the Continue button. Now, for some reason, the trip price is $150 higher than it was? What changed? I'm so confused. This screen doesn't even have a "Continue" button to click. It just says "View package details. If the new price is unacceptable, you can choose different flights from the Package Details page". Well, I guess I'll do that, then.

This brings me to another cool page with lots of options. I can change my flight info, what type of room I want, and if I want a car or not (mind you, not what type of car. It's a boolean operation). I tried changing flights, and it yelled at me, telling me it couldn't calculate the new cost, so I was actually stuck with what I had previously. I tried changing cars, and that worked perfectly.

There's a ton of different icons and signs for things, but there are way too many words on all of these pages for me to want to read. The important details of the flight are nowhere near as pronounced as they should be , and as a total newcomer to any of this, I'm fairly certain I'm just clicking on things and not paying attention to what's going on.

It seems like Expedia has become so all-inclusive and complex they've lost the essence of what they should be. Their goal is to make reserving everything easier, but between a poorly executing system, and a poorly designed site, it's hard to know what's really going on with this site...

Now I have a headache...

Cheers,

-Brad