best online flight booking website

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!

google trends

I'd like to share with you interesting service that google made available for use recently. It's still in google lab but it's working very well already.

Check out: www.google.com/trends

It allows you to see popularity of search keywords over time in Google. It can be one keyword but can be also multiple keyword. Do you want to check popularity of your favorite beer brands, cars, pop stars? This is good place where you can quickly start. See screenshot here comparing bmw (blue on the chart) with audi (red).

For more serious usage - it allows you to compare various ways on how people search for your products and services. Are people searching in singular form, or plural - are they search for notebook, notebooks or maybe laptop or laptops... This can help you to decide on how to name your products on your website and also on what keyword to buy in your SEM campaign. Enjoy!

Site reviews

One of my ideas on the content of this blog and on the way to help improve web experience is to do reviews of the websites. I plan to pick major company websites from various industries (automotive, food, home appliances, banking) and write review from perspective of customers.

These websites are way too often created from perspective of the company rather than from perspective of the customers and visitors. Such visitor feedback might be very useful for owners of such sites.

If you want to have your own website reviewed - please drop me note. I don't promise anything but will try to pass you feedback as well.

Web 2.0 - what’s hype, what’s real?

I suggest you read this great analysis of Web 2.0 and what it means. It’s from November 05 but it’s really well thought-out so it’s still very valid now.

The users/visitors rules - they are in charge - deciding what’s the web should look like, what should the content be. Blogs were always like this and they are mainstream now. It’s Web 2.0 guys!

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog on webdesign and webmarketing. I've decided to share my thoughts related to good and bad practices on the web. I do it professionally - I work in one of the worldwide leading technology corporations managing its internet organization for Europe.

I'd like to use my blog to propagate good practices and wise usage of Internet for companies. Companies invest huge dollars to present itself on the web. Way too often it's done without asking basic questions - why do we do it? What our customers needs online from us? What people to do on our sites? How we want the people to perceive us?

It was way too often clear that websites are created just for sake of having them as everybody else does. Within my blog I'd like to share ideas and tools on how to use the web so it's worthy for companies and its customers. Stay tuned!