TRAVELOCITY: Good service with occasional glitches.
Written: Aug 29 '06 (Updated Aug 29 '06)
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Online travel booking has come a long way from a few years ago. Even brick'n'mortar agencies rely more and more on online resources. Travelocity is one of the "founders" of online travel services, but is the grand daddy still fresh or old and dusty. Well, my rating gives my opinion away, but read on to find out why ...
IN A NUTSHELL
Travelocity provides comprehensive travel services with reasonable prices and excellent resources. Hotels are rated by users and reviews help to sort out the options. Price alternatives are typically listed if a cheaper option is available. The user account holds all you information and booking trips or simply storing it for later is no problem.
Reliability is the only part where Travelocity seems to have slight issues every now and then. This is typically preventing you from booking rather than "messing up" your paid-for tickets. It can be annoying nevertheless to return an try to use that saved trip and finalize it.
THE TEST
Alright, so I am currently looking for a trip to New Zealand and in order to find the best deal I concentrated on three providers: Travelocity, Expedia and Orbitz. (Hotwire doesn't sell international flights.) I also tried to find flights home to Germany and for my wife to Texas. The notes below are a mix of those three searches.
Ease of use: [*****] While there are only very few features on Travelocity that nobody else has -- if any -- the overall package is very easy to use. The home page holds easy access to most tools and the search function is easy to understand. Save an itinerary for later if you're uncertain and browse ratings and destination guides to get a better picture. A rating system helps making decisions, but should not be taken as absolute truth. A few bugs seems to crop up every now and then where attempting to book a flight may send you in circles between the log-in page and the itinerary button to proceed the process.
Pricing: [****-] Travelocity kind of pioneered the no-nonsense pricing that's found on most competitive sites. It shows the full price already in the search results and that's very helpful for rental cars and flights since those typically tack on a lot of fees that can make a seeming bargain expensive. Flights are typically some of the lowest I can find on the net, and sometime it only takes to search on a different weekday to get a lower price. Rental cars are pretty much average. If you're comfortable with electronic ticketing, it remains cheap. However, should you need a printed copy, the shipping and handling even of the slowest option is outrageous not seldom reaches more than $100. Fortunately if there is no e-ticket option on a specific deal, the shipping cost is reduced to a reasonable (but not cheap) $20 on average.
Services: [****-] Travelers find basically everything they need to find and research a destination as well as get all related bookings taken care of. Not sure? Save the itinerary and resume later. Flexible dates works great within the US, but is often limited for international travel. Up to +/- 3 days flexibility are easy to use -- even internationally -- via a matrix displaying fares relative to the dates. Greater flexibility than 3 days, however, only works for domestic flights to identify the best options. Once found, the itinerary can be saved and upon revisiting, the deals are updated and occasionally you're presented with significant cost changes (up or down). Booking information is available through your account and reminders are automatically sent out for changes or simply upcoming trip.
Reliability: [***--] Travelocity had trouble in the past with firewalls and the Search function simply got stuck and never returned any results. This has been largely resolved, but log-in issues remain where sometimes you're sent in a loop between log-in page and the saved itinerary. In those cases I found the only solution to be patience and try later again (same computer etc.). Pop-up blockers may prevent the status window to display, so you may allow pop-ups from this site. (You won't be bothered with unwanted kind.) Other than that, I found Travelocity reliable and safe to store my trip information. Paying Travelocity for a hotel room can be a little tricky. Sometimes the payment information doesn't reach the hotel and you may have to pay at the hotel. In most cases a double charge will not occur, but you better check. Uptime does not seem to be a significant problem with this website, though every now and then you will find a "system busy" or similar message. At that time virtually no functionality is available for a few minutes (another word for downtime). Issues typically occur in reference to the user account ("My Stuff").
ALTERNATIVES
Despite my preference for Travelocity, it still pays to venture out to other services like Hotwire (flexible travel needs) and the airline's websites. For the latter it's easiest to use Kayak for one-stop search for multiple airlines. However, kayak.com currently does not search sites like Hotwire or Travelocity and one may miss the best price. Surprisingly, I get often better rental car rates through USAirways.com than Travelocity or Expedia. Of course it's always a good idea to check even the traditionally more expensive competition like Orbitz or Expedia just in case there are any unexpected specials.
© 2006, theuerkorn
Recommended:
Yes
What product did you purchase or try to purchase? Flights to AKL, FRA, AUS
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