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Missing Links
Kirby's Korner · November 5, 1999

Why can't travel on the Internet be easier?

You have on the other side of your computer screen the greatest collection of information ever assembled on this planet. If you know what you're doing, you can find the weather in Milan, rent a cozy nook in a bed and breakfast in Bogota, and buy a lift ticket for Aspen.

If you know what you're doing.

Online travel has a long way to go before it's easy enough for the rest of us to use efficiently and successfully.

I rediscovered that just this week.

I'm off to a conference in Miami two weeks from now. I realized I had not made hotel reservations, and when I called the conference coordinator I was told the conference hotel was full.

No problem. I enjoy getting away from the group at these industry events, and we're talking South Beach here -- hotel heaven, with a property on every corner and several on the blocks in between. How hard could it be to find a nearby hotel room?

On a Macintosh operating on a slow dial-up connection, I first went to MapQuest to locate the conference hotel. I then asked for nearby hotel destinations and, as I suspected, dozens of tiny blue, bed-shaped icons popped up. But when I tried to identify the nearest hotels, my computer locked up and I had to reboot.

On to TravelWeb. I restricted my search for hotels in Miami Beach using only the dates of my stay. More than 130 properties popped up. But which were within walking distance to the conference hotel? There wasn't an easy way to tell.

MapQuest knows where the hotels are in relationship to one another; TravelWeb gave me information on individual properties and would let me reserve online. But they're not working together. I switched to a better Windows machine with a faster dial-up connection and started again with MapQuest.

I couldn't get the site to return a basic map. It dawned on me that since I signed up for the MyMapQuest program a few months ago on my Windows machine, I've never been able to retrieve a basic map from the site. I suspect my MapQuest cookies are either fried or only half baked.

To Vicinity's MapBlast! After receiving a map centered on the conference hotel, I could locate and book nearby "featured" hotels (read: hotels with a marketing arrangement with Vicinity), or I could use a nifty "yellow pages" listing to find many more hotels, arranged in order of increasing distance from the conference hotel. Just what I was looking for. But I couldn't reserve from this list, and the information on the properties was minimal.

Okay, back to TravelWeb. Based on my handwritten MapBlast! list, I arbitrarily chose nine hotels near the conference hotel to look at in more detail. I narrowed my choices to two properties. One presented an outside photo, one a photo of a typical room; I would have liked to have seen both for each location.

When I decided to check availability at one of the properties, TravelWeb had me type in the dates of my visit a second time, even though I provided that information before. In a nice gesture, however, I did not have to provide this information a third time once I was told rooms in my first choice were unavailable.

My second choice was available -- a nice art deco hotel (it says here) on the beach side of the waterfront street. I reserved without incident.

The whole process didn't take me more than two hours. To be fair, I was taking notes as I proceeded. Let's say anyone else could have gone through the same steps, encountering the same problems, in 30 minutes.

That's still too long. A frustrated travel agent whose e-mail I read today accused me of not having a life if I liked online travel. I'm beginning to understand what he means.

I know more about the hotel I'm staying at than I would have if I had gone through my flesh-and-blood agent. But a call to the agent would have taken a third of the 30 minutes a real-life use of the Web would have taken me.

Other agency Web sites might have eased one part of my task, but -- I know from experience -- another part would have been more difficult.

If I had ignored the mapping sites and gone straight to TravelWeb, likely I would have been done in 10 minutes, but because I don't know the neighborhood, I would have been limited to properties on the same street as the conference hotel. If MapBlast! had let me reserve through it's "yellow pages" listings, I could have included the side streets in my consideration.

All of which emphasizes my point: we're nowhere near the wealth of information and ease of use we could have if Web sites were better integrated. The facts we need are available now. What's missing are the links.

David Kirby is the editor of the Interactive Travel Report. His column appears on Friday. You can reach him at dbkirby@pressroom.com.