In many ways, planning a vacation in the information age has become more difficult. Before, escaping from the monotonous demands of daily life was as easy as going down the road to the local travel agent. Sure, you had to pay for her services, but what was the alternative?
Today, the travel agent is supposed to be largely irrelevant. You know you can get a better deal and have more control over your own plans by using the Internet to book your trip. Using an agent is just downright foolish, as you now have access to the same tools she does—and you usually don’t have to pay service fees over the Net.
And so it was that I too was recently lured to travel-planner’s promised land. Armed with only my keen sense of bargain-hunting and technophile idealism, I hit the Internet to begin planning my upcoming vacation to Europe. Four people, three countries, six hotels, six train routes, three day trips, and a mountain of guidebooks and brochures.
After having gone through this process, I now have greater respect for the lost art of travel agenting. First came the plane tickets. I had to search a handful of sites for two different flight routes (as half the party was flying from a different destination), then go through a completely separate credit card website for one of the flights in order to redeem mileage points. And just when I thought everything had been timed to perfection at a reasonable rate, one of the two airlines changed departure times, sending me through a quagmire of confusing email notifications. Eventually, I had to pick up the telephone—something the Internet is supposed to enable you to avoid—in order to confirm flight times.
Then there were the train reservations. I could buy the Eurail tickets from the Eurail site, but I had to make reservations through a separate site. The Eurail people sent me a schedule of all trains, but the reservation site’s schedule seemed to be missing trains. The trains I wanted and had planned on now seemed not to exist. Grudgingly, I again picked up the phone to seek resolution.
Finally, there was the hotel search. This went off without a hitch. I maneuvered around Hotels.com like a giant among men. Quick, simple and cost-effective. The Internet had redeemed itself in my eyes. But, alas, my celebration didn’t last long—I soon read that my credit card information may very well have been stolen. Apparently, a single auditor’s laptop containing information on thousands of Hotels.com customers was abducted.
The Internet was supposed to make my travel planning easier. Instead, it swallowed enormous chunks of my valuable time, gave me intense and pulsating headaches, and may have cost me a great deal of credit card grief. The end result of my piecemeal planning effort is a pile of receipts and disparate itineraries. Technology may have saved me a few bucks on my trip through France, Italy and Germany, but it’ll be a miracle if we can manage to avoid mistakenly ending up in Krakow. C’est la vie à l’âge de technologie.
-Craig Kaufman, Reichert Communications
