Slashdot Mirror
Online Travel Agencies?
dbright asks: "I am currently planning my upcoming honeymoon, and I was wondering if I should try getting my tickets, and/or making travel arrangements online using one of the many available retailers (cheaptickets.com, priceline.com, etc...). I wanted to ask Slashdot readers about experiences with any of these companies, and their thoughts on making arrangements online."
Why? Well, The travel agent got us the same price. And she pointed out a few things about cruises we didn't know. And she had a bottle of wine sent to our table during the cruise. Experience does matter, and if you find someone who knows there business, then you can do well going with a real live person.
And everything I said matters even more if you are going into unchartered territory, like somewhere you have never been to before.
But, price does rule, so if you know what you want, and you are sure that you can get a better deal online, then book away.
Just don't torture yourself on your honeymoon with some leave at 6am --- take 7 connections --- got it from priceline flight.
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
Not to sound like a commercial or anything, but I would go with Orbitz IF you are strictly looking for airfares and such. Within the last couple of years, I have stopped trying all the different sites for fares, and now I just use Orbitz. I even used relatives who were travel agents before that, but they couldn't really find anything cheaper than the online stuff for just airfare.
But if you are looknig for like a tour package, like adding a good hotel, car and other activities, use a travel agency. They have the abliitity to link up special deals that they have with certain hotels and car rental places.
As an example, I recently went on a trip to Maui. After looking high and low for open hotel rooms, special deals on those travel sites and lots of googling, my friends and I just gave up and went to a travel agency. That day we had our tickets, hotel, and car all set up, with special deals for some snorkeling, etc if we wanted to do those things.
Hope this helps!
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
If you really want to get where you're going instead of rotting in airports and suffering canceled flights, use either a real, live travel agent -- or someone like Travelocity/Expedia.
:)
I've had very, very bad luck with flights from Priceline/Orbitz/Hotwire.
Basically, with the auction/super-duper-discount flights I've had the following problems:
* Flight departure time changes drastically multiple times before the day of flight. Sometimes you get a notification email. Sometimes you don't (always confirm your flight the morning of). Sometimes you get shifted between flights.
* Sometimes up to 3 connections that take you on ridiculous routes and quintuple your travel time ( Jacksonville to Raliegh to DC to Miami?)
* No way in hell you'll sit together if it's a full flight.
* The usual delays, bad food, getting bumped, canceled flights, etc that you can expect even paying full price.
Bottom line: it's your freakin' honeymoon. You want to be minimizing your chances for catastrophe, not adding to 'em.
You really don't want it to be in your fault if you spend half of your trip stuck in Atlanta because you saved $20 a head on tickets. Start the marriage off with a bang, that would.