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I’m posting this from a hotel room in Glasgow (blazingly fast free wifi, but chat and IRC are blocked, natch). When opportunity beckoned I jumped on the occasion of a few days of sightseeing, de-stressing, and getting to know Scotland a little.
Since my move away from France in 2006, this, it turns out, is the first personal trip I have been organising on my own, with the exception of small excursions within a 2h radius around London. There has been business and private travel, including to North America and the European continent, but booking the accommodation and transport was someone else’s problem then.
Now of course I knew, in a slightly air-headed, theoretical way, that our state of near-constant connectedness has fundamentally changed (and added to) our options when organising a trip. But it was only going through the steps myself that this point was driven home in a real, personal sense.
I started planning on Saturday, reflecting on trip dates. Leave on Wednesday? Too much to do in London. Thursday-Saturday? Can I stay until Sunday?
Within little more than 1h, there was substantial progress. All this, done:
Yes, the actual booking and buying took a few more days. I wasn’t in a hurry, read Wikipedia on Glasgow sights, and ran my plans by a few people.
So after all’s done, how difficult was this interwebby way of going about it? For the hotel and the concert tickets, not at all. I used Booking.com, a service I had come across in a professional context (i.e. not primarily as a user) and found I really liked the way they do internationalisation. Their prices were at the low end of comparable services, too. For the concert tickets, I spent longer studying the seating plans of the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall than on the monetary transaction. These two were a snap.
Where I met resistance was on the National Express site. At first I liked it. Compared to Virgin Trains’ web presentation, it stands out in a number of respects: National Express has a visually cleaner layout, simpler way of picking the cornerstones of your trip to start out your search, and more meaningful and better organised search results. The tickets I tentatively picked were about £10-20 cheaper than what I found at Virgin. And there is a handy “save this trip” function that allows you to store a particular connection/price without having to buy the ticket outright. However, there were two snags:
So what to do now? Two possibilities: Buy from Virgin, or treck over to the train station and have a human being search for the best ticket for my purposes. And process my debit card. (Well a human being armed with a computer terminal.) Still keen on wifi on the train, I chose the latter. Result: A 1h trip on the Tube, a 10min conversation with the ticket advisor-droid-person behind the counter, and I had tickets for pretty much the same times and trains I had originally picked out. And for £10 less.
Given that the web site advertises all over the place with an exclusive 10% online discount, a discount included the online prices I was quoted on the site, I am slightly bemused.
[Post drafted on the train from London to Glasgow using the on-board wifi and Google Notebooks.]
chris @ March 27, 2008
chris @ March 24, 2008
chris @ January 21, 2008
chris @ December 23, 2007