| REVIEWS
Cruising
Cyberspace
Web
Site Pick Of The Month
By Pam Wegmann
Travel, whether it
be for business or pleasure, usually means booking three major components:
air, hotel and rental car. The hotel is usually the most task oriented
and time consuming because of the variety of offerings. There are
several online travel sites where you can seek information, but I would
direct your attention to a local dot com excelling at making it easy to
find and book a room:
www.turbotrip.com
Turbotrip started
out under the name Roomfinders as a small 800 call center here in New Orleans
when its founders noticed there was no central registry of room rates and
availability for this popular destination city.
What has evolved
is a site that provides information and reservations for hotel rooms in
over 60 cities around the world, as well as direct links to multiple airlines
and rental car agencies. The site is fairly well laid out and easy to use,
without too much of that annoying in-your-face advertising.
The best feature
of the site remains its core mission: supplying hotel rooms. On the Home
Page, you can either click on a continent or enter a city name in the search
bar. Once the destination is input, a page of pull down menus will appear
for you to enter the month and date of your arrival, the number of nights
for which you need reservations, the number of rooms, and the number of
adults per room.
After the system
completes the search based on your input, you will see the best feature
of this site: an easy to read list of hotels for the destination city.
Each hotel listing is actually a table of information that shows the type
of rooms available, specific days of availability within your date range,
and a day by day rate schedule for each type of room. (Kudos to the
site developers for bringing the user directly to the list rather than
putting in an intermediate search result page as many sites do.)
Just below each hotel’s
name are three links to help you in your decision process: hotel information,
which provides a photo and a profile; amenities, which provides a checklist
of features; and, map & location, which draws a map of the hotel’s
location. At any point click on make a reservation and complete the entire
process online.
Another convenient
feature of this site are buttons at the top of each page that take you
on your way to book an airline, rental car, or find special deals.
Click on Airlines
and you will be taken to list of hot links to most major airline sites.
Click on Car Rental and you will jump to a page listing links to car rental
company sites and a few state specific specialty auto rental agencies.
There is also a link
called “Hot Deals” which are specials being offered by some hotels in specific
cities.
While turbotrip.com
is not a true travel portal in that it does not provide full travel related
content, it is a way to start at one place, book your travel accommodations,
then jump off to book your transportation needs. Happy trails!
Knowledge is Power!
:-)
June 2000
Questions/Comments
can be sent to pam@info-matters.com
or faxed to 504.738.0016. You can also reach Ms. Wegmann at 504.738.0070.
|
