KEY POINTS:
Trade Me's long-anticipated travel website, Travelbug, went live yesterday with listings from around 1500 travel providers around the country.
It looks pretty good. The design borrows some central elements from the Trade Me website so is instantly easy to navigate. Accommodation is categorised by price and type (ie: backpackers, B&B, hotel) and there are some decent graphical elements - like a map of New Zealand you can click on to drill down to a particular part of the country. There's Google Maps embedded to show the location of a particular hotel which is a nice touch, though I wonder why Trade Me didn't use the ZoomIn mapping it supports with its Smaps service.
Clicking on an accommodation provider takes you to a second screen where there's a blurb about the premises and facilities, several photos and a panel displaying a calendar showing the price of rooms and the status of their availability.
That last element mirrors quite closely in style the centrepiece of the Wotif website. I've used Wotif for years, both for local and international hotel bookings - I made a booking for a room in San Francisco just this morning. Wotif has always served me really well and I think it still has the edge on Trade Me in several departments.
What Trade Me has however, which in time will prove incredibly valuable, is the community feedback element. It could allow Travelbug to mirror TripAdvisor, which I use to get user reviews of hotels I've found on Wotif.
It's saved me from checking into flea bag dives on a couple of occasions. What I don't like about Tripadvisor is the chaotic e-commerce element of it. If you're interested in getting a price on the website, it will open up to half a dozen new windows taking you to various travel booking agents. I hate that.
The thing I originally liked about Wotif was that if you booked well in advance you'd get good rates for hotel rooms as long as you weren't conflicting with some busy period, like school holidays. It's usually cheaper to book midweek as well. It means you can often get a good deal on accommodation if you're willing to avoid the weekends.
Travelbug seems to have one rack rate for any day of the week - though there's some differentiation for certain accommodation providers. It would be good to see Travelbug adopt that distressed inventory type element where a hotel room price can vary day to day depending on the likelihood of that room being filled.
Anyway, Travelbug is a sign that the online travel market here is maturing which is a good sign.
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Anyone used Wotif or Tripadvisor? Any horror/success stories? What other web services are good for booking accommodation here and abroad?
The local tech blogosphere:
Aardvark on why telecoms is still relatively expensive
Geekzone on Metro Wi-fi
Richard MacManus on Quechup
