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:

• Get some idea of the layout of the place (Glasgow, that is).
• Find a hotel in a central location, within budget, that offers free wifi; know how to make the booking.
• Decide between Virgin and National Express East Coast trains — a decision that came out in favour of the latter (free wifi in the carriages, which outstrips Virgin’s faster trains). Find the best price for the train tickets, decide on times and options. Know how to buy the ticket.
• Find out about concerts in Glasgow. Decide on most desirable ones, find out about pricing and seating options. Know how to buy a ticket.

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:

• The first one was minor, but annoying: If you reopen a saved trip and proceed to the checkout, and then for some reason can’t or don’t finish the transaction, the trip is no longer saved. The next time you have to start the search from scratch.
• The second one was a showstopper. Try as I might, I could not get the National Express e-commerce system to accept my (bog-standard, UK) debit card — the very same card that I had been using during the very same lapse of time for multiple other bookings and purchases, on-line and off. No combination of ways of entering my name (initials? middle name? middle initial? full names?), address, card number, security code, etc. etc. would deign go through. There was not a scrap of information where on the “payment details” form I had erred. Damn.

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.]

Oh, and a great chocolate cake. They know I’m a geek. (I adore the hot pink horn thing!)

(They also told me they had had the card since June. I was impressed at so much consideration until I heard the reason: The then-newly implemented Sharepoint calendar had made them think my birthday was June 12.)