Comment Articles

Internet holiday planning takes too long

Eugene Lacey AnchorDesk

Published: 04 Apr 2002 16:44 BST

Many people will have spent last weekend surfing the Net trying to find that perfect holiday home in Tuscany/Cornwall/France, Spain (tick as appropriate). You know the kind of place I mean. It's close to a sleepy beach that nobody knows about, apart from the folks that run the Michelin two-star beach café there.

The property itself is quiet, very quiet, and not overlooked, yet it is a short drive from a buzzing fishing village with several award winning restaurants, a chic nightclub, and an enormous hypermarket, roughly the size of Bluewater, on its outskirts.

Most people won't have found what they were looking for last weekend, despite having spent most of Good Friday and bank holiday Monday casting the Google fishing line. OK, so we all want the impossible in terms of our holiday destination -- and the Internet encourages the belief that just one more search will produce the holiday home of your dreams. It won't, of course, and it is all too easy to waste valuable hours endlessly searching the Net while your offline neighbours have nipped down to the high street travel agent, booked it up, and nipped into Starbucks for a quick Americano and Skinny Sunrise Muffin into the bargain.

At this time of year, the race is on to snap up the last few remaining decent properties (the really good ones were reserved two years ago) so you have no time to waste. My advice is to be economical in your use of the Net.

Booking flights on the Web is the easy bit. The 'no frills' airlines are ushering in a whole new era of leisure travel -- and we have become used to booking flights in any spare five minutes that presents itself -- during the commercial breaks on television, or last thing at night before turning in. What could be more convenient -- and, better still, there are unbelievable deals to be had. Top sites like EasyJet, Expedia, Ryanair, and ebookers are blazing the trail for all online retailers. But arranging the rest of the holiday, and in particular the accommodation, is not nearly as well handled on the Net.