Travel Blog

Travelocity and Kayak both take a heavy-handed approach. They set up a security gate, where Javascript dogs sniff each incoming request. If Javascript is disabled, the guards kindly give you a customer alert.

I’ve written about using travel/tour podcasts before (just think, your kids are plugged in but they only look like they’re not learning anything as you walk the streets of New York or Paris.) There are language podcasts, a whole list of travel podcasts on the UK’s Guardian site, podcasts from Europe expert Rick Steves, plus a bunch more tips here on iPods and family travel.

If you gotta go, why not give something back. Websites such as www.causetravel.com are popping up all over the internet. Cause Travel is actually an online travel booking engine for the “National Foundation for Cancer Research”. Non for profits and charity’s are using such sites in an ingenious way to raise funds for their cause. The built in commissions on every plane ticket, hotel, or car rental that would usually go to massive conglomerates such as Travelocity or Orbitz are sent to the organization instead.

About 30 employees, friends, and family joined in the San Francisco National Public Lands Day effort, which was co-sponsored by Travelocity and served as the kickoff event for Travelocity’s cause program, Travel for Good.

As part of the Give Time Together Campaign and Travelocity’s Travel for Good program, our group was dedicated to helping clean up the beach at John D. MacArthur Beach State Park in North Palm Beach.

Don’t believe the ads. Don’t believe there’s a little blue gnome out there looking for your best interest. If you get suckered into one of their low-low-price travel deals, try to get it straight from the airline as the price will only vary by a few bucks. Travelocity is perhaps the worst travel agent I’ve ever worked with. They are inflexible, bind you to retarded rules and while they claim to do everything they can to get it right they will hide behind every “policy” under the sun to make sure they do not have to go an inch outside their commitment to put butts in seats of airliners, hotels beds or cruise ship deck chairs. If all you have to use is their website, they’re fine, but the second you have to get in touch with a living human being, get ready to be pulled down into a vortex of horrible customer service, barely-understandable agents and people who’d rather yell at you than help.

If you think websites like Expedia, Travelocity & Kayak eliminate the need for a travel agent, I give you 10 reasons why you are dead wrong.

Yet, check Travelocity and you’ll see that a flight from New York to London takes as little as 6 hours, 25 minutes and is non-stop! Better yet, on Virgin Atlantic I came up with a round-trip air fare of $551 US, just over half what I paid to travel within North America.

I think the world rejoiced when web-based travel sites came out. Orbitz, Travelocity and such changed our lives. I can’t even remember what it was like before them.

In a couple of weeks I have back-to-back on-site jobs with several east-coast clients. So I went onto Travelocity and booked a multi-leg trip. Simple enough. When I finished my complex reservation and booked the ticket, I was duly charged a total fare for my trip.

Of course, I thought of the obnoxious lawn gnome commercial: Travelocity. Their options for anything under a C-note a night (in the city I want to book a hotel room) were non-existent, and that’s incredibly un-helpful. I would recommend them only to people who have money to burn and/or really like lawn gnomes.

To find a place to stay I first went online to see what hotels offered suites where 6 people could stay. I didn't want to get 2 hotel rooms because the cost of 2 rooms would typically be more expensive then a suite that could accomodate 6 people. It would also mean that my wife and I would need to split up between the rooms to keep an eye on the kids. I first went to Travelocity to see what they had. Travelocity had a dropdown box asking how many kids and adults I needed a room for. After filling in the options they gave me a good selection of rooms that could accomodate 6 people. However, none of them were close enough to where my wife wanted to stay. I then went to Expedia and Orbitz. Both of those sites also had dropdown boxes for the number of adults and kids, but they returned results of hotels that clearly could not handle 6 people. So if you need a travel search that can handle larger families, Travelocity is the better one to use.

Retailers with a dynamic product mix and customers who are passionate about new products are particularly well suited to RSS feeds. TowerRecords.com, for instance, allows users to sign up to hear about new music releases in a variety of genres, through its “Tower Alerts” service. Travel sites like Kayak, SideStep, Travelocity, Orbitz and others have also recently introduced RSS feeds showing good deals or destination suggestions.

I left work about noon (much thanks to Bossman for letting me out early) and hit the road. 357 miles later, I hit Newport, KY and pulled into the Travelodge parking lot. There was a nice big sign for the motel as I crossed the bridge into Newport, and there was a fairly new Aquarium and shopping area right across the street so I was hopeful. The lady at the front desk was quite nice, so I was still hopeful as I made my way to the room. Then I opened the door. Not so good. It was a non-smoking room, but it reeked of smoke and I later found ash on the bathroom floor, like the maid had been smoking in there or something while cleaning the shower. The pictures don’t really do it justice. Wallpaper was peeling, the thermostat came from a museum (and was so convoluted, that they included instructions mounted to the wall next to it), electrical plugs weren’t screwed in, etc. Oh well, I had prepaid on Travelocity, so it was too late to change now. And for all it’s faults, the Travelodge is in a really convenient location. So be it.

And also for those of you who asked, yes, the owner’s wife is employed here. She’s technically the owner – tax breaks for being a woman-owned business and all. She was supposed to be a figurehead. Yeah. She’s trying to run the business, and she’s just simply a bean counter. She will lose, quite literally, thousands just to save five or ten bucks. Ridiculous. She expects our reps, who travel one week a month, to check Expedia, Travelocity *and* Orbitz first, then once they’ve found a flight or hotel, to check their websites directly, to see if it’s cheaper, because she’s found that you can sometimes save $5 by doing so. Those were her words verbatim in our sales meeting. So, to save a crummy five bucks, let’s waste an hour or more looking for the best price. An hour that could be spent doing something productive, like, say, WORKING. No. I’m not kidding.

I saw one of Travelocity’s commercials this morning, and thought of writing about my experiences with them. I using Travelocity relatively early in their existence, and used them for several years after that.

**Kayak is a search engine for travel that Gary Price turned me onto that has literally saved me probably thousands of $$$ and is so far superior to Expedia / Yahoo Travel / Travelocity that its astonishing. I really hope that this company makes it.

Kayak’s Buzz looks pretty rockin’. I wonder if the ‘Wow’ I uttered is similar to the one folks uttered 5 years ago when Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz launched?

Since we first blogged about Google offering direct links to online travel databases (Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz) a few days ago if city pairs are placed in the web search box, others have picked up on yet another Google test. The new service is primarily about accessing pricing info, timetables etc. This is DIFFERENT than the flight info “shortcuts”, “Smart Answers,” etc., that most of the major web engines, the airlines themselves, and others have been offering for several years.

The Science Museum in London has a new exhibit that may have you frantically hunting Travelocity for a cheap flight. The Science of Aliens, which opens tomorrow and runs until February, explores the science, the fiction, and the philosophy of our search for extraterrestrial life.

I think my important relationships are mostly strong, but I want to hold them gently today. And I hereby vow that when travelocity sends me those fare watcher messages that includes a city where someone I love lives, I'm going. It's not enough to think "wouldn't that be nice?".

Then, we’d decided, since we were spending the money on a plane trip down (although not that much through an amazingly cheap travelocity plane/car deal) that we might as well hang out for a few extra days. So we headed to Asheville to a B&B that was nice but not fantastic. Went hiking in Chimney Rock Park and saw where Last of the Mohicans was filmed. The waterfall there is twice as high as Niagra - but nowhere near as wide or as loud. It was rejuvinating to be outside and hiking and to spend the time together.

Have you ever refused to buy a product or use a service because the television commercial is just crappy? I know I have. I will never use Travelocity just because of the stuped "travel gnome." Geez, what a sorry commercial.

I do all my travel bookings online, and use multiple travel sites to do the bookings. I use places like Orbitz or Travelocity for comparing rates, along with AAA guides, which I get free with my annual membership (benefits include roadside assistance, maps, and guidebooks). I'll often use individual vendor sites to book hotel rates, since these often offer the best prices over what can be found at the aggregators.

As usual, we were last minute deciding to go, and last minute trying to find a place. Travelocity and all the other online reservation places showed nothing available. I knew there were tons of mom-n-pop places that would have something, but didn’t know how to get phone numbers short of swiping a phone book. Today, on my way to Columbia for a meeting, I stopped at a rest area which had travel flyers, and found some listings with potential.

I just found out today that online flight search websites, such as Travelocity and Orbitz, use information stored in cookies to alter your flight searches. So when you do a search and then come back to do another you will receive different results. The real concern is that the searches are altered to show more expensive flights and fail to reveal the cheapest tickets. If this is the case, do they show you the cheapest fares on the first search, the second, or some undeterminable future search. Anyone know the answer?

This means that if you sign up for a Travelocity newsletter and you sign up for the registry, Travelocity might be in violation of the Utah and Michigan law by sending you the very information you have requested. Interested in a deal on a hotel getaway package? Not if you live in Utah or Michigan, buddy.

On our way home from Las Vegas, my wife and I had a flight out of Las Vegas on American West and a connection in Orange County to San Jose on American. The American West flight was delayed an hour, so we would have missed our American flight. The obvious thing for anyone to do in that situation is to call their travel agent. So, I called Expedia and they were just as useful as tits on a bull. Basically, the guy told me that he couldn’t do anything for me, but was happy to “sell us tickets” if we could not get home. Now that is just plain bad customer service. I approached the America West counter and they were more than happy to help my wife and me out. They went out of their way to get us on new flights home — the flights eventually were delayed also, so they again helped us get a new flight into San Francisco with a shuttle back to San Jose. I applaud America West’s commitment to their customers (even when they have connecting flights with other airlines). I criticize and denounce Expedia for their terrible customer service — sure they are a low-cost travel agency, but they should do much better when their customers are stranded. Next time, my wife and I will try Yahoo! Travel, Travelocity or one of the other travel sites.

Travel search engines Farechase, Kayak, Mobissimo, and Cheapflights showed big spikes in traffic in the last six months, Hitwise reported in MediaPost. Kayak visits were up more than 6,000% from October 2004 through April 2005. Farechase showed a 659% increase. Mobissimo grew 350% gain, and Cheapflights was up 56%. The travel market share of visits to those four meta search engines picked up 304% in the first half of 2005, while that of the top five online travel agencies (Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Yahoo! Travel, and CheapTickets) increased by just 11%. blogs.zdnet.com

We spent Thursday looking at four different apartments. We then got to our "hotel", the Howard Johnson. I do not believe we could have found a worse place that was rated "3 stars" on Travelocity. I won't go into details, but I never expected to find a bullet hole in a window where I stayed at. Let's just say that we are no longer staying there and got a refund from Travelocity and the Best Western that we are staying in now is actually cheaper (go figure). I took some pics of the room which I can post later when back in Minnesota.

Based on Rick’s feedback, Travelocity is now examining implementing a program in the spirit of Customer Champions that will take the guess work out of following up and will also provide feedback to the customer on their issue, problem, or suggestion.

If you've been following along, you'll recall that I blogged about Travelocity in the hopes of giving you some suggestions on customer service following. The lesson/observation was that it is not enough to just answer email fast or respond with yes we ... [Read More]

To add to the problem, many travel sites such as Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity claim to search all available airfare and hotel deals out there, but here's the hidden, ugly truth: these sites often make exclusive "deals" with travel providers, exclude many of the lower-cost airlines from searches, or favor one airline over another in their search results.

Just heard on the radio that LastMinute.com are being bought for something like 850 million by Travelocity. Couldn’t find it on /. or the Register but maybe it’s too new…

Picked this up off the news wire. The point of the release is that more and more "boomers" are turning to travel sites like Travelocity, Expedia, etc., for their travel needs, and abandoning travel agents in the process.

Earlier this spring, Travelocity launched AARP Passport, an online travel-booking site that claims to offer AARP members exclusive travel discounts plus access to all of Travelocity's regular deals. The site does provide members with some exclusive deals and easier access to certain long-standing AARP discounts, but Passport is still a work in progress.

All companies that outsource should do as good a job of outsourcing to India as Travelocity does, and if all of the outsourcing firms hired such competent people, you'd have a lot less complaints. However, getting decent outsourced reps requires paying decent money, and most of the companies who outsource are so cheap that even though they're saving money by going overseas, they want to save even more by hiring the bottom of the customer service barrel.

- Travelocity has some good deals on airfare. At first glance. But then when you actually try to get specific information you find out that either a) all of the flights are sold out for then entire time period for which they are advertised or b) they may be offering round trip flights from New York to Frankfurt but the particular airline doesn’t actually have service from Frankfurt to NYC, only NYC to Frankfurt. So in both cases I’m left wondering why they advertised something completely useless in the firstplace and why it’s...

My vote for the next character blog? Travelocity's Travel Gnome.

Has anyone touched on the fact that in the event that if Travelocity's gnome needs to blog, he (They) could Flickr it?

There's something about those Travelocity "Roaming Gnome" commercials that I just don't understand. The gnome is supposed to be a "denouncer of travel myths", so they always start out with a "myth" that allegedly is disproven by the gnome announcing some great deal you can get on Travelocity. Then the second "myth" the gnome attempts to disprove is always something he's completely wrong about, like jellyfish being "cuddly" or the Mona Lisa "begging to be smooched".

If the gnome is so completely wrong about the other stuff, how are we supposed to trust he knows what he's talking about in regards to Travelocity's deals? I know, it's just an ad campaign... but seriously, somebody didn't think it through.

Prior to leaving for this trip I read a great post on someone's blog about hotels that show their displeasure at guests who book reservations via discount services ( Travelocity, Expedia, etc) by either giving them lousy rooms or removing night time mints.

I spent about two hours over the weekend trying to find the post ( note to self: --always grab the URL of things you want to include in blog)

I couldn't find the post but I did find a related article in U.S. News &World Report. Last night I just drove up to the Hampton Inn and requested a room. The only thing I cared about was the free wireless service. A couple of years ago I chose hotels based on the exercise room, now its whether it offers wireless and if that service is free.

Later this week I will have an opportunity to experience this phenomenon myself. I have a reservation in Chicago that I booked through Travel Zoo and got a great rate at the Whitehall Hotel.

I stopped using a travel agent about 5 years ago and while it can take a little time to find that deal you want, with a little work it can be done. Aside from going directly to the airline web sites looking for fares I also compare fares using Travelocity and Expedia. But three new meta search engines have emerged that offer another avenue to help you. They are Kayak, Mobissimo and Sidestep.

To test these new services I did several searches for travel I have planned in the near future. The results were interesting. To start Travelocity and Expedia results were almost identical with Expedia being just a bit cheaper. However the three new search engines all found cheaper options than Travelocity or Expedia and not just by a few dollars but by a substantial amount with Kayak consitently finding the cheapest fares.

Travelocity has again published a list of airports that have the dubious distinction of being the worst in the nation when it comes to rental car base rate add-ons – like taxes and other fees charged by local governments that target a captive audience like travelers. This year, the top two airports are in Texas.

Travelocity.

The folks at Delta cancelled the flight that I purchased. Should be no big deal, right? Right. Riiiight. It was a big deal. At 2:42 yesterday I got an email that said that I needed to call Travelocity right away, my flight reservation had changed. Turns out that my flight from Lansing to Cinncinati had been cancelled. However, I had been booked on a new flight.

So, I call Travelocity. Turns out the flight that I'd been booked on left lansing at 9:06 pm. This was problematic as my scheduled flight from Cinncinati to Atlanta left at 8:45pm. This is called a misconnect. The first gentleman I spoke with was certain that I needed to send my paper tickets back to the main Travelocity office in San Antonio so that I could be issued new tickets. I was assured that nothing could be done until I sent those paper tickets back. To accomplish the information transfer described above took around 20 minutes (most...

Well, I didn't just want a paper ticket that would misconnect me, so I called travelocity back. This time I spoke with a woman named Jennifer. Nice woman. She informed me that the fellow I'd just spoken with for the past 20 minutes was, in fact, dead wrong about sending my paper tickets back. All I needed to do was show up at the airport. Great, I thought, now all we needed to do was deal with the misconnect.

I don't know if any of you have ever been on hold with Travelocity.com, but if you have been, you're probably aware that their hold music is the sort that makes people go postal. It wouldn't have been so bad if I'd been on hold for, oh, say 10 or 15 minutes--but after 35 minutes of hold music I was about ready to start killing things.

I'm very grateful to these two women--Jennifer and the Delta representative. However, their employer, Travelocity, should be ashamed of itself. First of all, they should be properly trained so that they can deal with easy to fix problems--like mine--in something under the hour and a half that it took for them to figure out my minor problem.

I have a lot of sympathy for Jennifer. She was most likely working in India--where Travelocity has outsourced it's call center. That means that she was dealing with ornery Americans for her shift which probably went from something like Midnight to 10am, her time.

I don't really like dealing with pissy Americans ever! Imagine doing that on the night-shift. Regardless of her kind service, I'll probably refrain from working with Travelocity again. Too many stories of nightmares out there for me.

The Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives (FWE) in Palo Alto named Travelocity chief executive officer Michelle Peluso its top woman entrepreneur.

The Travelocity editors sifted through 30,000 customer nominations and picked the top 10 hidden spots for each state.

Selina Chan is the new Market Manager for South East Asia, Steven Ler becomes Market Manager for Greater China and India, while Katie Han is the Market Manager for South Korea. They will support current Market Manager, Mark Hillman, who has been with Travelocity�s Asia Pacific team since its establishment in 2004. Hillman will now focus on driving business into the partner hotels in the Pacific market and Japan. Alex Nieuwenhuys has been appointed Market Coordinator Asia Pacific.

• Compare prices for different dates. Travel+Leisure recommends Travelocity and Orbitz as having among the most flexible search functions, allowing you to search for lowest prices at various times. For example, on Orbitz, you can search for the best deal up to three days before and after any designated date.

Michelle Peluso, CEO of the travel search engine Travelocity, will never forget the employee who was requesting a meeting to discuss a cost-saving plan and sent an e-mail titled "You Bring the Ice Cream, I'll Bring the $2 Million."

For travelers looking to uncover local treasures, Travelocity has released a list called "Local Secrets, Big Finds for 2005."

"Disney's Magic Your Way Tickets fully complete our TotalTrip Disney package and offer Orlando travelers the easiest way to book a Disney vacation, including airfare, hotel, rental car, airport transfers and discounted theme park tickets in a one-stop shopping process," said Bryan Saltzburg, vice president of packaging and cruises for Travelocity. "These additions truly complement our current offerings from Disney, including 10 on-site Walt Disney World Resort hotels in Orlando and Disneyland Resort theme park ticket packages in Anaheim, California."

A new list by editors of travel Web site Travelocity places the Jacob Leinenkugel Brewery in Chippewa Falls and the Oriental Theatre on Milwaukee's east side among Wisconsin's top 10 off-the-beaten-path travel destinations.

Travelocity Monday released its list of Local Secrets, Big Finds vacation/entertainment/restaurant list for 2005, and 10 Arizona desinations made it.

Travelocity, which bought out its joint ventures in Europe, has an option to buy all of Zuji in January 2006.

With this new platform Hyatt Corporation now automatically "pushes" updated net rates and availability to Travelocity whenever there are modifications, thus eliminating the need for Travelocity to query or "cache" this information from Hyatt's CRS. Hyatt brands using Travelocity's third generation connectivity include Hyatt Regency, Grand Hyatt, Hyatt Resort and Park Hyatt.

The great deals on plush hotel rooms these past few years got you used to lavish accommodations. Scoring low rates was often as easy as one-stop shopping at Expedia.com or Travelocity.com.