ArticlesSomething odd happened today, and I am trying to decide what it signifies about the future…
Realising I had been procrastinating about booking some flights and accommodation, today I went to a travel agent and got it done.
A travel agent. Bricks and mortar.
I believe this is the first time in five years I have been to a travel agent, rather than booking online. I’ve grown tired of dealing with the confusopoly, losing money on incorrect tickets, having surprise charges sprung upon me.
Actually, the story is slightly more complicated. I walked to a nearby travel-agent that I have never used before. It is an almost desolate office; the sign said “Open”, but the door was locked and there was no response to knocking – tried again 5 minutes later. I figure it is a front for a drug-running operation, which is cool, because I am tired of buying my illicit drugs off web-sites too.
So, then I thought “You are being silly, Julian.” and tried to use a popular web-site. It made me choose flights based on the baggage-free prices (I will have plenty of baggage), sprung a $20 booking fee on me at the last minute (with no indication of whether I was going to be charged another $20 when I booked my accommodation), and then – in the confirmation page – presented a totally different flight which left at 6:30am, and stopped off in Canberra along the way (neither of which suit me).
I walked away, got in the car, and fought shopping-mall car-park traffic to get to a travel agent that was open – I knew I would be a few percent more for the tickets, but wanted to get the hell away from that web-site.
So, what I haven’t worked out is, which of these is true.
Travel was always too complicated for people with no, or moderate, experience; online travel booking has been over-hyped, and the bubble is finally bursting; travel agents have their place, and will one day rightfully return to their valued role.
I am a wuss with more dollars than sense, who is willing to pay someone to do a menial task.
I can’t work out how to use a web-site; I can’t work out how to optimise a moderately-complex pricing model; I can’t plan ahead and provide sufficient attention to detail to work out an itinerary correctly. Thus, I am officially too old and senile to be a software developer any more, and I must hand in my badge and debugger.
I need a nap; I’ll be back to booking my own journeys soon. And pretending that I wanted to be in Canberra at 7:15am.
Comment by configurator on September 10, 2011
Travel has always been complicated, because the websites are basically crap. The dirty secret for travel websites is that the mark-up is extremely unless you go to a website for a specific travel agent. These ones are more expensive and are perfectly usable.
Where I work we make travel-website software, and that thing is a behemoth. It’s a ridiculously complicated codebase which of course has modifications for each web site. But our clients’ websites are generally far better than sites like expedia or other cheap travel sites.
I believe any site that lets you compare prices is going to be extremely complicated unless it incorporates a powerful AI that chooses the best flight for you. You could specify a graph of which flight time is good for you and which isn’t, and the importance of airline quality, and probably 4 or 5 other properties that you care about, and it would find your personal optimal flight. But who’s going to make that site? Any site that compares prices will have a low profit margin unless it can become extremely popular.
Comment by Alex on September 10, 2011
I find that the Skyscanner flight price comparison website works rather well for those of us with more sense than dollars. You can limit number of stops, departure and return time, and display a graph of prices for each day in a month.
I’m interested in what percentage of your total goes to the travel agent – I’ve never bought flights through an agent before.
Comment by Julian on September 12, 2011
Configurator, you remind me about a job I had in the mid-nineties, working on a 4GL system that ran on big-end servers (mainframes and the like).
The story around the office went that travel agents were actually much faster using a command-line interface where they could enter long arcane commands learnt by experience, rather than any sort of interface that gave any form of useful feedback, guided what could be entered through widgets or could be navigated with a mouse.
This was a most fortunate state of affairs, because it exactly matched what the software (which was generally accessed through either a green-screen terminal or what was effectively a terminal emulator on a Windows platform) could provide.
I’ve not looked at what travel agents used these days, but I have this funny inkling that it isn’t a command line on a green-screen terminal. I wonder if and how that belief was overturned.
Comment by configurator on September 15, 2011
I’ve seen travel agents use AS/400.
Also, you might be interested in this new service: http://www.google.com/flights – unfortunately only available in one small country at the moment, but could be quite useful in the future. If there’s one thing Google knows how to do, is pick the best option for you automatically.
Comment by Julian on September 15, 2011
Configurator, what was the front-end? I mean an AS/400 could be running a web-server, or talking to a thick client on a Windows box. Or was it a traditional terminal interface?
Also, when was this?
Comment by John Y. on September 15, 2011
Amazing. I work with an AS/400 every day, but the only places I have seen them used outside my workplace is hospitals (my previous employer provided AS/400 software for hospitals) and casinos. In all cases, they used green screens (either dumb terminals or Windows clients), but this was about 10 to 15 years ago. It’s always a surprise to me when I hear of them used elsewhere.
The AS/400 community is small but fairly stable. Impressively, there is even a tiny subcommunity of iSeries Python users, who have managed to get packages such as Django working on the AS/400.
No, this has nothing whatsoever to do with travel agents, but this blog has mentioned Python many times and now has mentioned AS/400, which meets my flimsy standards for segue.
Comment by configurator on September 16, 2011
It was a few years ago. Maybe 5 years. When I say AS/400 I mean with the terminal interface – I’ve seen it used in so many places that I’ve come to think of them as one and the same (although I know they aren’t).