Comment Articles

Internet holiday planning takes too long

Eugene Lacey AnchorDesk

Published: 04 Apr 2002 16:44 BST

There is a more or less universal absence of intelligent search options for the customer. Like a good airline site, you want to be able to tell the holiday home Web site some basic information about what you are looking for first: when you want to go, that you want/don't want a private pool, it has to be near to the beach, you need four bedrooms and a fully equipped kitchen. You then want it to go away and search its database and come back with a list of properties that match your criteria exactly.

The failure to deploy intelligent search, online availability and booking, is the reason Internet holiday planning is such a woeful experience and is taking people longer to arrange their holidays than the old method.

It doesn't have to be like this. What's needed is a holiday planning site that is a little bit like ZDNet UK: a site that would provide news about holiday destinations and independent reviews of accommodation. Using an agent-based shopping bot similar to our NetBuyer shopping channel, it would search the Net in real time to find the latest prices and best deals that match your search criteria. The site would become a community of users interested in consuming and sharing information about the best, and worst, holiday destinations.

This is first base. Beyond that the ideal holiday booking site would offer content and functionality specifically tailored to the context of buying a holiday.

Here are five features that I think would boost the usefulness of holiday Web sites.

Use the Web to provide better location information. Location, location, location, say the estate agents when advising home buyers -- yet for the holiday home renter it is all too easy to book what appears to be a great property, but arrive and find that it is adjacent to a sewerage plant. The good Web site would use online maps to honestly represent the property. A brilliant example of how well this can be done can be seen in Teleworks Software's excellent CD-ROM about the Isle of Skye. Combining zoom in, zoom out Ordnance Survey maps and 250 photographs taken from strategic points -- you can locate a point on a map and then click on a photograph to see the view from that exact point. If only all holiday home Web sites could use this technology. Michelin is also to be commended for its excellent trip planner site, ViaMichelin. (Persevere with it. It's hard to use, but worth the effort.)