Online Travel Sites: A Refreshingly Honest Perspective
When we sit down to make travel plans, where do we start? And ultimately, how do we land ourselves on that plane, jet-setting across the globe? Without a doubt, the answer for a lot of people is online travel sites. More and more these days, online travel is growing in its popularity. But, who are the people behind the surge in the usage of these sites? The answer is the person sitting right next to you, most likely.
Recently, I sat down with a local woman who resides in the greater Fort Collins area in order to get a realistic perspective from an ordinary citizen on how online travel sites play a role in her life. Shawn Dixon, a self-employed veterinarian and mother of two young children with a full schedule confirms what we have all been wondering. Do the claims made about the benefits of online travel sites really ring true? Dixon’s interview gives us every indication that the answer is yes.
Q: Shawn, can you give me a run down on the initial process you go through once you’ve decided you want to travel, whether for business or pleasure?
A: Well, I typically start off with going to the Travelocity website.
Q: Your very first step is to go online?
A: Yes, I go online first. I search for flight and hotel packages, or car, flight, and hotel packages. I usually do a cross comparison between these packages on Travelocity, so I can find the best deal. Is it cheaper to book a whole package or could I find the best flight deal on Travelocity, and then go to a car rental site and book the car through that.
Q: So, your main concern is pricing?
A: Yes. I will check with about three or four other sites to compare prices. Once I find a few different deals I like, I go to TripAdvisor to check out the reviews on the hotels or resorts that I’m thinking about staying at.
Q: How confident are you in what you read on sites like TripAdvisor?
A: Well, I read every review and take it with a grain of salt. Typically, if a place has half or more bad reviews, I’m not going to book it. If I see 10 reviews and seven of them are good, I’m likely to go there.
Q: How does being a mother affect your travel planning?
A: Well, it changes things a little bit. Now, I’m more into finding cheap flights that also fit into a more specific schedule. I want flights that have convenient times. When I’m looking at lodging, I want to find kid friendly places to stay, and also places that allow kids to stay for free up to a certain age. That’s another reason I like Travelocity because I can check a box that says I’m looking for kid friendly destinations.
Q: What are your thoughts on travel agents or agencies?
A: I’ve never worked with a travel agent. I’ve only ever gone online. The thing is, my husband, Ben, has a patient who is a travel agent. She looked into a trip to Ireland for us, but didn’t find anything that was necessarily better than what I’d already found.
Q: So from her experience she was able to give you a ball park idea of what you should be looking for? She realized she might not be able to provide you with any better deals than you’d already seen online?
A: Yeah, pretty much. She told Ben, if we could find a package to Ireland for less than $3,000 we should go for it, and that she hadn’t been able to find any better deals than that. One of my friend’s is a travel agent, and through her company the deals she was finding were actually more expensive.
Q: What about booking trips through places like Costco?
A: I’ve never booked through Costco because their prices tend to be more expensive, and they usually advertise for places that I’ve already been to or don’t want to go to.
Q: So, you are saying that you like the option to tailor your own trips to your needs or wants that the online travel sites provide?
A: Yes. I like being able to choose my own destinations with the travel options I want. I can do that by checking off boxes, and the site will take me to deals that are more suited to my tastes.
Q: In your opinion, what are some pros and cons of using online travel sites?
A: I’d definitely say that the convenience factor is one of the biggest motivations for me to go online. I get to choose all the small details of my trips, and I can book a trip within a matter of minutes if I wanted to. It’s also quicker for me to go online. Well, most of the time. That’s also a downside because sometimes there are so many options and I spend a lot of time researching these trips, and it’s like, do I keep looking for a better deal? Do I wait to check next week to see if ticket prices went down? Do I wait to book on a Tuesday because I think the tickets will be cheaper on Travelocity on that day? I found a package deal I like, but if I wait a few days to book, is a better deal going to come along? You can kind of run yourself in circles with all the what ifs online. Whereas, a travel agent might be easier because it’s kind of like, here’s your options, pick one, and go.
Q: When you book trips online and go to these places is it pretty on par with what the online travel site told you it’d be? Any major disappointments?
A: I’ve not had any bad experiences booking through Travelocity, except for one flight through Spirit Airlines. It was the cheapest flight that Travelocity offered, so I picked it, and it was one of the worst flights. But most of the time it’s on par.I recently booked a trip to Playa del Carmen, and I booked that through Travelocity, and I felt like the hotel exceeded my expectations when I got there. The reviews had been good, but they went above and beyond once I was there.
Q: What are your thoughts on the future of online travel sites?
A: Well, with the way that society is going with increased technology, I think that online travel planning will continue to be successful and grow.
Q: Why is that?
A: Because of convenience. You can just hop on the internet, pick a place you want to go, book your trip, and you could be in and done in five minutes if you wanted to. Cut out the middle man. But for those people who like that personalized service they’re going to continue to go to travel agents, but I guess I kind of see travel agents becoming a little less common for middle class. Um, probably higher income families, yeah travel agents are nice because they take care of all the details, but they can afford to pay those people to do that. But for everyday joe, they are gonna go with online travel.
Q: And are you okay with the direction that travel planning is taking?
A: Yeah, sure, it’s nice to be able to go and search any destination in the world and be able to see how to get there, where you can stay, what you can do, how to rent a car, and how much it’s going to cost, typically all in one location.
Q: Any last thoughts or comments, anything on this topic?
A: Get out there and see the world. It doesn’t really matter how you do it, but just do it.
SOURCES:
Shawn Dixon, D.V.M.
