Travel’s on my mind at the moment, for a number of reasons. We’re planning a big trip at the end of the year, and it’s incredible how much easier it is today to research and transact online, even for some very remote and obscure locations. BUT there are still some terrible websites out there, operated by travel companies, hotels and estate agents. It’s really not excusable any more to have a bad website for your company, there are so many simple, low-cost options available to people if they look around.
On a related topic, I was at a meeting with an airline this morning, and we were introducing ourselves. I said that back before the Internet, I’d been a business analyst at Thomas Cook, designing applications to make it easy for sales people to sell flights. It used to be an incredibly specialised skill, with training courses on the bizarre command line syntax of computerised reservation systems. To find out if there were any seats on a flight from London to Sydney on a given date would’ve been something like “ALHRSYD23JUL” and that was an easy one.
So we tried to design a system to make the work easier for all travel agents. And now we can all do it, using Expedia, or Opodo, or ba.com. And when did you last visit a travel agent?
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