Pols Consulting

This post is a bit of a therapeutic release valve. Last night I tired to book some airline tickets.  It took nearly 3 hours; although it felt much longer. How hard should it be?

I started out trying www.kayak.co.uk. It has a refreshingly intuitive user-interface and it searches lots of web sites for the best prices.  Just what I was looking for.

I particularly liked the nifty flight filters you can use to explore how the time of the flight, or the choice of airport impact the price.  Although I did find myself having to scan around the search results page (see above) to hunt down the date of the flights (I didn’t expect to find it in the heading. I guess the annoying advert in between the heading and the search results did not help).

The killer problem with Kayak is that it’s only a travel search engine (a friend described it as all fur coat and no knickers!) You can’t book the flights on Kayak and they have no control over the quality of the data.  It turned out that I couldn’t book any of the flights returned in the search results!

They all pointed to a dreadful site called cheaptickets.com (the name should have triggered some alarm bells!).

When I first clicked the link from Kayak to Cheaptickets.com it spent ages displaying the following:

before it finally gave up and said (at least it said sorry!):

I tried clicking the link again (glutton for punishment).  This time the error message read:

We’re sorry. Due to changes in airline availability, the fare for your selected trip is no longer available.

It presented a list of alternatives that I could select.  At least it’s been helpful!

So I, rather naively, selected one of newly presented alternative options, and waited, … and waited, … and waited some more before it responded with  (yes, you guessed it):

We’re sorry. Due to changes in airline availability, the fare for your selected trip is no longer available.

Not one of the recommend suggestions actually worked!  What kind of web site gives you a collection of impossible to select products?

Aaaahhhhhh.

Next I tried Lufthansa.com - the cheapest option was £1600 per passenger, just to travel within Europe.

I then moved onto Lastminute.com.  I entered the dates and airports all over again and just when everything was looking good, I got this:

Aaaahhhhhh.  I was starting to think “Sod it - I don’t need a vacation!!”

In final desperation I went to expedia.co.uk.  I tend to stay well clear of expedia for multiple destination flights due to the high chance of sustaining a repetitive strain injury from the amount of mouse clicking required to complete the simple task. 

I entered the data and it presented me with the various options for the first flight.  The idea (if you’re feeling charitable) is that you select the first flight, it presents the options for the second flight.  You select the second flight and it presents the options for the third flight.  At this point it tells you that this combination of flights will cost several thousand pound. You gasp, mutter something under your breath, and start all over again; randomly clicking flights and hoping for the best.  With any luck you will be able to remember which ones you have already clicked on.

There is another option.  You can choose “view complete trips” and Expedia will display selected combinations of flights that are ordered by price.  I clicked this.  Some of the options were very close to what we wanted - except that one of the flights left at 6am.  So I adjusted the time of this flight to see what would happen to the price and all the other flights changed too.  Aaaahhhhhh.

Eventually, clicking like a madman, I manged to find a comination of flights at the time we wanted that we could afford.  I thought the internet was supposed to champion the consumer?  All I got was a shonky and painful user experience.  Something I don’t want to repeat in a hurry.

That’s better.  It’s all out of my system now.  Deep breaths… Think nice calm thoughts…