Most travelers book their flights and make their hotel arrangements using online travel agents. They are convenient, fast, and make it easy to compare and find low prices – but there is a number of things that online travel agent services, like Kayak, SideStep, and FareCompare simply don’t (or can’t provide).
That’s probably one of the major reasons that 23% of travelers say they would use a good off-line travel agent if they could find one. Later this week, I’ll be looking at the various online options you have to finding a good off-line travel agent.
To help my upcoming post, I’d like to know what features you wish online travel agents offered?
Maybe you want to see ‘free airport wi-fi’ or ‘Starbucks’ as search options or Facebook integration. Personally I’d like integrated statistics to let me know what the chances are a connecting flight will be delayed and give alternatives (something a human travel agent could do very easily). Or do you not care so long as the process is fast and you get a low price? Help me out in the comments by letting your ideas roll and your rants rip.
[photo by: alexanderdrachmann]
I’ve never done that.. 🙁
Used an online travel agent? I’m surprised, I book almost exclusively through a Travelocity, Kayak, or one of those.
Anil how can you book on Kayak 🙂 its a TMS not a booking engine, it seems this post is a fake one done by a third world country staff paid 10 cents a comment to push blogs.
@ RG:
You can book through it – what I was trying to get at is other than price, what search criteria would you want offered?
10 cents huh? That’s a pretty lame comment. Everything written on foXnoMad is original content.
One Feature i would suggest in hotel booking is —
Say i look for room availibility for 3 PAX, then the search result give me a option as —
1. Search result with 1 Doublebed , and other 1 Single bed.
Does any search engine give this logical segregration based on number of PAX?
Cheers
Rgds,
Ashish
@ Ashish:
So you’d like to search based on the number of double/single bed combinations?