WebWord

I travel a lot for business and pleasure. I often gravitate to sites such as Orbitz, Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Expedia, for finding deals and making reservations. If needed, or properly enticed, I will visit specific company web sites, such as United, Hertz, Alamo, and Southwest.

In a recent search for a hotel, however, I started getting really tired of several issues with a few of these sites: broken back buttons, slow loading pages, dead functionality due to Java errors, and more. I’m quite tired of dealing with these problems, including the results. The search results never make sense because they are organized by preference of the web site (read: advertising dollars) not by price. I don’t know about other people, but price is the first sorting I care about by far.

By some bit of chance, I ended up on Trip Advisor. It has interface problems (e.g., clutter, poor contrast) and could use my help, but overall, it gave me what I wanted. Unbiased user reviews (nice!) as well as information about places to stay. I admit, paradoxically, that I had to do more work to get what I wanted, but in the end my satisfaction was very high. I ended up being directed to the web site of a small bed and breakfast, and I was able to securely make a reservation for my stay right through that site. It was not a perfect experience at all, but it was a good experience because of the user reviews, the honesty of the site, and the volume of useful information.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 31st, 2004 at 12:54 am and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.