Friday, March 20, 2009

The best travel site so far - expedia.com


Before going on a trip, I do extensive research to try and figure out the best deal on the net. We are planning a trip to Hongkong - a 4 night / 5 day kind of deal, where one night is spent in Macau. 

The Indian setups like makemytrip.com, cleartrip.com and ezeego1.com are useless when I want to do a flight + hotel booking. They offer them separately, whereby I loose the advantage of bulk booking..Obviously,  there is the option of taking the holiday package where I travel coach class, have buffet breakfast, lunch on coach basis, something else on twin sharing basis and some other thing on sharing basis. I feel put off, when I read such stuff...Useless..In any case the I think the Indian sites have a long way to go before they can develop the market for non packaged holidaying.

Looking at International sites, I admit I went to two sites only - travelocity and expedia.

The reason why I have not clubbed traveloctity with Indian sites is because it is primarily an International player which has made a presence in India as well.( For me, making a presence means that I get to pay in INR and the site probably has payment options via local banks. )

Going by travelocity's lineage, the site offers a good combination for flight + hotel booking. However the service is very basic and there is no intelligence applied to the idea. 

Going to expedia.com was a true delight. I can
a. Book a multi destination trip - really cool
b. Book a trip in which I want to book a hotel for only a part of my stay - Now this is the option which has really made me smile. As I mentioned before, I wanted a one night macau and 3 day hong kong stay. All other sites offerred me a 4 night hk stay or nothing else. This site atleast gave me the option to choose 3 nights in hk and book return flight tickets with them and yes it works out cheaper if I take this combo when compared to booking the itineary item by item. 

Agree, this still does not allow me to choose the Macau in the same one payment deal, but I think that would be the next step in travel planning. 

The only other time when I have been more exhilirated about booking trips online was when I booked my first online ticket with Air Deccan. If any body wants to build a good travel site, expedia.com is the site to emulate!

Friday, March 13, 2009

One of those "Did you know" questions


Did you know all watches made in the world, which carry roman numerals, have the number "4" represented as "iiii" and not the conventional "iv".


Talk about information hiding in plain sight. Every one must have come across a watch with roman numerals, but how many of you guys knew about this ?