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In a fit of DIY determination, JOHN HARRIS decided to use the Internet to book a five-week holiday to the US and discovered the high price of his over-exuberance.
Travel agents really do earn their money.
Last year, emboldened by the ease of booking
flights to Sydney with airline websites, I decided to book our family's
five-week trip to the US and Canada by myself.
After all, I rationalised, all the tools
are there to construct a do-it-yourself odyssey: Detail-rich travel websites,
online booking systems and low-cost Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone
calls in case I had to actually talk with a human.
Several months later, I had hand-knitted an
amazing meander through North America - and, in the process, thoroughly
convinced myself that travel agents earn every cent of their fees.
My first step was to book airfares to and
from Los Angeles, including a stopover in Hawaii to break up the
return journey. Although Qantas has its own site at www.qantas.com, I decided to use a
multi-airline site, Webjet www.webjet.com
to compare available fares.
Webjet's simple interface allowed me to
enter the required destination and travel dates and then select the available
airlines, from the cheapest to the stratospherically expensive. Eventually the best fares were from Qantas.
Next was to organise internal travel for
our stay. To avoid driving a car on the wrong side of the road, we decided to
travel by train, which in the US is spelt Amtrak.
In many ways, Amtrak is a throwback to
another century - not necessarily the 20th - with its lumbering
engines, its lack of modern communications aboard the train and timetables that
can run from more than an hour late to 45 minutes early in the course of an overnight
journey.
Amtrak's online booking system www.amtrak.com was a rather balkanised
process: While I could book two-week US Rail passes online, I had to phone the
Amtrak Call Centre to book sleeper upgrades for overnight trips.
I was greeted by "Julie", an automated call
agent that coped admirably with my Australian accent to direct me to the right
department.
Things slowed down after that: Booking the
upgrades took more than 60 minutes on the phone - fortunately, this cost only
$3.52 due to my VoIP phone service.
Booking an Ottawa
to Las Vegas
airfare with United Airlines www.united.com
was a much simpler process: I compared available flights and fares, and even chose
my preferred seats, in a few minutes.
Using the Internet as a virtual travel
agent really comes into its own when choosing accommodation, assisted by travel
advice sites such as TripAdvisor.
I chose the area of a city we wanted to
stay in, such as the French Quarter in New
Orleans, and then used www.tripadvisor.com to look for hotels.
Reviews from previous visitors, especially
about whether hotels were family-friendly, helped to form my opinions. While an
occasional grumble was okay, a sustained wail of complaints was the kiss of
death for a hotel.
Once I had a shortlist, I'd call the hotel
to questions receptionists to check out if the promised courteous culture was
borne out in person.
As a result, we ended up staying at great
hotels in Hollywood, New
York and the Grand Canyon with
consistently helpful staff, an invaluable commodity on a long trip.
However, was my DIY itinerary worth the
effort of putting it together? Absolutely not, if you place any value on your
time!
I probably spent more than 50 hours over
several months working my way through websites, discovering dead ends and
untangling the overlap between online and telephone booking processes.
However this hands-on approach provided
fantastic foreplay for a fabulous holiday.
John Harris is managing director of Impress
Media Australia. You can view his website at www.johnharris.net.au
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