I fly quite often and need good online booking engine. I've tried couple of them and finally settled with Expedia (http://www.expedia.com/) Expedia offers really well thought out experience for choosing the best flight available.It has all the basics that every booking engine should have:
- it remembers your departure airport - as you usually start from same place in your travel
- it proposes reasonable dates for the trip - why it's so difficult for most of the sites to place good default dates. It's much easier to update some dates than type them from scratch.
- it has flight search featured prominently on the homepage - quick and easy to search
it allows you to order by price but also via flight duration and time of arrival/departures
It has couple of useful options that others can only dream of:
- it helps with misspelled airport names - do you always know how to spell Ljubljana when you need to go to this City in Slovenia?
- it can advice that there are better offers when flying day before or after
- it can advice if there is possibility to fly to nearby airport instead
- it has (unfortunatelly US only) opportunity to search for best prices of flight when your dates are flexible - you can say - I want to go from place A to place B, when I should go so I get best offer
It's really showcase of great user experience. Expedia has such good experience that I usually have better visibility for flight options there than professional travel agents.
It has all it needs for occasional traveler. Just some ideas for improvements for frequent travelers:
- would be great to have more details on the fare rules for advanced users (how flexible is the ticket, what's the booking class)
- would be great to know what airline operates the flight for code shared flights - so I can avoid getting flights by Tyrolean Airlines even if book Austrian Air. ;-)
- would be great to have possibility to search using parameters of frequent flier program. So one can limit the search to airlines that are members of certain programs.
You can also find information on online flight booking website review on my sister blog on WordPress.
Do you use Expedia? Do you maybe use other online engine that offers even better experience? Your comments are very welcome!
