After spending the last few hours figuring out travel plans for a weekend in July, I know that I miss having a travel agent. The internet is often about self-service and removing the intermediary, but time is money, too… and I just spent a lot of my personal currency. (Eventually, I spent some dollars, too.)
Spent significant time with the following airline websites today:
- Orbitz
- Ted (first time)
- Frontier Airlines
- Southwest
- Delta
- America West
- SkyWest
- Continental (eventually got our $)
- JetBlue
I didn’t link all those because (a) they are easy to find/guess (b) I’m lazy and (c) none of them really deserve a link. My wife and I were both working on this, with separate computers. Still took a lot of time.
Of course, with all my whining, it’s still pretty incredible that any individual can peruse so much dynamic information on their own schedule. And the schedules and places we’re trying to coordinate aren’t particularly common, so it was bound to be complicated. Maybe I should be amazed that such a complex system is now manageable/navigable by normal people like ourselves instead of trained professionals.
Note: Every time I try and get to the Adirondacks in northern New York from San Francisco, I long for the replacement of the hub system. Maybe by the time my children are my age. Maybe.