Two things caught my eye when I loaded up Expedia - the right and left columns (I ignored the middle since it seemed to be mostly ads). I had a destination in mind that I wanted to explore, so I looked at the world map in the right column and clicked around in regions until I found Turkey (grouped together with Greece in a single region). From the region screen I tried to select Turkey again, it turned orange as I hovered over it, and I clicked it... And nothing happened. Apparently I had to click the name "Turkey" on the text list of regions below the map. Inconsistent!
From there, I was given a list of hotels in Istanbul. I selected a hotel that looked nice (although I had no idea how they were organized - it was set to "Expedia picks", but the first listing had an average rating of 3.0 and I found one with a 4.2 rating further down) and decided to book the next two weeks there. After searching for a LONG time (it must've been a full minute) it told me that no rooms were available for my huge date range and gave me the option to search other hotels. I really would have liked an option to prune my dates according to what the hotel had open, but there was no indication of how full the hotel was during the period I selected.
I came out of this brief experience with two tasks: Using the world map to select a location, and booking a hotel & airline for a long period of time.
-Zach Alexander
From there, I was given a list of hotels in Istanbul. I selected a hotel that looked nice (although I had no idea how they were organized - it was set to "Expedia picks", but the first listing had an average rating of 3.0 and I found one with a 4.2 rating further down) and decided to book the next two weeks there. After searching for a LONG time (it must've been a full minute) it told me that no rooms were available for my huge date range and gave me the option to search other hotels. I really would have liked an option to prune my dates according to what the hotel had open, but there was no indication of how full the hotel was during the period I selected.
I came out of this brief experience with two tasks: Using the world map to select a location, and booking a hotel & airline for a long period of time.
-Zach Alexander
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