buter's BABY blog

<rant>
Those of you who have been keeping track of me will know that I'm pretty involved with the whole online travel arrangements thing. I've researched our ski trip to NZ (7 weeks to go...!!) online, as well as researching the travel agents themselves online. I've selected and booked a place to stay in the Hunter Valley for the super six weekend away. I've been known to book flights to Melbourne (and we fly to Melbourne a lot!) online as well.

In all that I've found some pretty damn fine travel agents/comparison tools. Like the NZ holiday cost generator (pity it only works for the one company, but fine nonetheless). That's a very neat one. Also I've used Air New Zealand, Qantas, and Virgin Blue's online trip planners. And speaking of trip planners where would I be without the excellent CityRail trip planner (well I'd probably be right here still, but it's made life much easier!) And for comparing prices I've tried zuji, webjet, and travel.com.au. And using the comparisonators is so much easier than investigating each individual airline!!

About those last - a quick review. Zuji is tedious as it's international based and far too busy with extraneous flash movies playing all over the place.
I like webjet but it is very slooooooow to load/search/respond.
travel.com.au seems lovely - as it's fast to load and search but I had major problems with things that shouldn't have been an issue!!

Here's why I'm not using travel.com.au any more:

1. after registering, if you close the page, when you reopen it there's no place to login!! Nope, not at all, not until after you run a whole new flight search - then the login comes up.


2. I stupidly messed up the credit card details (though I'm sure there was something funny going on there) and they sent me an email telling me it was all bad - fine - and telling me to fix it ... so back to the website (try to login -see point 1 - argh!) but can't find anywhere to update the credit card details for an existing booking - so go to call them...


3. heeeey, the number to call isn't in the email they sent me!! ... back to the *&$^!%# website to find out their contact number.


4. ring them and they say "oh no, of course you can't do that - but I can update it for you.."


5. fine, so they fix it - apparently. She said they would send the e-ticket straight away.
   ... and 5 hours later the e-ticket hadn't arrived
   
   
   
   • So I emailed them. Again.
     


6. Eventually they emailed me 2 copies of the e-ticket. (what's that, in case I lose one?)