The problem is this: my goal is not to book flights at specific airlines, at specific airports, with specific ticket classes — it’s to book a trip. Trips have different goals. For example:
or
I don’t care about the details. I want to know:
I don’t want to have to know that Airport X is actually 30 miles from London, so I’m going to have to get a bus that costs me another £30 and takes an hour. That should be worked into the equation. I don’t care that renting cars is twice as expensive in Manhatten as it is upstate. If it turns out that a high-speed train is almost as fast as a plane, I want to know that.
See, travel sites create the illusion of providing the information that I cite above, which is what makes them so infuriating. In practice, it almost invariably takes me several hours of looking at options just to figure out how I effectively can get from point A to point B, and what the costs and logistics involved will be.
Here’s how it works in my dream world: I pick two places on a map, just like I do on Google Maps, and I get back options for how to get from point A to point B, with all variable covered. I get nearly exact amounts of time, total costs and when I can get started. I can chose to optimize for speed, comfort or price.
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