3 ms·
What I've always wanted is travel booking, not flight booking. I want to know how long, how much and what my options are for getting from $x to $y at $z time.
by wheels 16y ago
What I've always wanted is travel booking, not flight booking. I want to know how long, how much and what my options are for getting from $x to $y at $z time.
This still drives me nuts. If I'm at home in Berlin and have a meeting in in central London, I don't want to have to figure out that if I fly from one of the two airports in Berlin to one of the four airports around London that I'll have to use these kinds of busses and trains or taxis or rent a car and have to sort all of that out myself.
I want to know how to get there door to door, and I'll pay a decent premium to have it all put in front of me where I can buy my tickets all in one go. I hate travel booking because it seems to be without fail a minimum 2 hour exercise sorting out the options and picking one.
Back in the day I had a go-to travel agent for such. Unfortunately finding a good travel agent often requires checking out 10-15 of them and I've been too lazy for that as well since recent moves.
Blog post on this a while back: http://scotchi.net/2009/09/what-i-hate-about-booking-travel-online/ http://scotchi.net/2009/09/what-i-hate-about-booking-travel-...
- christonog 16y agoWhat kind of premium would you (or the average traveler) be willing to pay for a travel agent replacement webapp? I've been thinking about this as well while working on my own travel based project. Perhaps this is an opportunity for me to pivot in the future, if need be.
- loumf 16y agoWhen I used travel agents, it's more like this -- I have $X and I want to be at a beach next weekend (Island? Florida? Big lake? Fri-Sun, Thu-Sun, Sat-Tues -- what's the cheapest) If I know exact dates, places, etc -- travel booking isn't hard enough to pay much for. The problem is, you go book it somewhere else when you have the info, so you have to go after affiliate fees and be as good at the booking as you are at the advice.
- wheels 16y ago10% is my gut feeling. I'd imagine that the plan of attack would be figuring out the top 10 or so most important cities and working out the details for them (airport transportation, transit, car rental, taxi rates) and going from there. As to loumf's concern, once I trusted the site (say, after getting one booking commission free), I'd have no problem with the details not being revealed to me as to flight numbers / lines, details of public transit, etc. until I'd purchased. But I'm not sure you'd need that if the commissions are reasonable; I'm willing to pay to have my planning simplified.
- pbcdwa 16y agoEasyTravel -- 10% more expensive. 1,000% more convenient.
- ojbyrne 16y agoWhile working on a similar product (http://tripadvisor.com/flights http://tripadvisor.com/flights) I suggested that incorporating transportation to the airport in terms of both time and price would be a great feature. Didn't happen but I'm still convinced it would be really useful in figuring out tradeoffs.
- notahacker 16y agoseems daft they'd overlook that... surely they could build it in as a way of upselling bus/train/taxi/car hire tickets if nothing else...
- ojbyrne 16y agoI think its a challenge to collect the information and keep it updated.