Ordinary Gweilo

Is the Internet a great timesaver or a terrible timewaster?

I’ve just spent the last few days trying to get information about car hire and hotels in the UK for a relative who is going over for the first time later this month. I am happy to help, but it can be a very frustrating experience.

When I first tried using car hire websites a few years ago, they drove me crazy. After entering my requirements on the first couple of screens, the system would time-out (or come up with a strange error message) before it got as far as providing a quotation, and usually you would have to re-enter all your information and try again. Or give up…

Now, with faster Internet access things work more smoothly, but most sites still require you to go through several screens. I am not sure whether they do this deliberately to stop you trying too many different options or whether it is simply a design issue, but it sure makes the sites slow to use.

Hotel booking sites are a more recent innovation, and they usually seem to work tolerably well The puzzling part is that they often show you a weird selection of different rates (midweek saver, corporate, standard, Tuesday special) for the same room.

My experience is that they don’t always put their best offers on the web, and they sometimes tell you rooms aren’t available when they are. Last year I needed to book a hotel in the UK for someone at fairly short notice, and managed to do so but at a price that seemed a little high (and without being to book the required room type). A few days later I called them on the phone and was offered the required room at a better price (including breakfast). A few companies do now claim that their Internet rate is always the lowest available or that they will match any better offers you can find, but I am not sure how you can verify that.

I have also noticed that some car hire companies offer different rates depending upon where you live. Go to Hertz and tell them that you are a resident of Hong Kong. Try again as a UK resident and the prices are significantly lower – but you can’t book it because you need a UK address. If you call the UK phone number you get quoted the UK price and they don’t ask where you live, so that’s the answer to that one.

However, there can be special offers for booking and paying in Hong Kong, so you just have to be careful. Obviously the advantage of checking several websites is that you get a good idea of the prices that are on offer, so you can judge whether you are getting a bargain. After that, I think that it’s always worth a phone call to see if there are any better offers before you make a booking.

It can be quite interesting to see how prices change over time. The most transparent are Easycar, who offer significantly lower prices if you book early, but can be very expensive if you leave it until the last minute (the risk of booking early is that you cannot make changes without paying a large penalty). Assuming website prices are accurate, many other companies offer discounts for early bookings (with some restrictions), but sometimes also have bargains for late booking.

There is a good site for enquiring on train services in the UK, and the best bit is selecting the fares. These can vary wildly (from as little as 20.00 to as more than 200.00 for one journey), and I’m not sure that anyone understands which fares apply on which trains, so being able to view the options and make your choice is very useful.

Getting back to whether the Internet is a timesaver or a timewaster, searching for a hotel usually means that you have to sort through dozens of (virtually identical) third-party sites that want to take your booking but don’t offer very much information about the hotel. For hotels in large chains, it is obviously easy to find the corporate site, but for individual hotels or small chains it can be a real challenge.

The weakness of search engines is that they can be manipulated quite easily, though of course this works to the advantage of Google (etc.) because they can sell ads that appear along with the listing. If I were running a hotel I think I would want to ensure that my website was shown prominently on major search engines rather than having potential customers see third party sites.

However, one thing I have never been sure about is whether hotels want to take bookings direct or prefer to use travel agents. I assume it is still the case that you can usually get the best rates for Hong Kong hotels by dealing with local agents (unless you are a large corporate customer), though this does normally mean you get the cheapest room type. Given that the hotel has to pay commission to the agent it seems a little strange, but then I don’t suppose any large hotel could handle bookings for every single room.

Or perhaps this is all about market segmentation – different agents deal with particular types of customer or nationalities and set prices accordingly (high for Japanese visitors, for example). Obviously the Internet makes it difficult to do that, though some companies do still try, as I found with Hertz.

The answer to the question? No idea, sorry.