Point, click and fly

By DIANA CLEMENT

The internet is changing the face of independent travel. No longer do you need to rely on guidebooks and travel agents to get to Tauranga or Trieste. Armed with a credit card, you can research and pay online for virtually every last detail of even the most obscure holiday.

New Zealanders are booking travel online in their droves. NielsenNetRatings found that 27.5 per cent of regular internet users had looked up travel information on the internet and 13.9 per cent had bought a travel-related service online during the four-week survey. But booking travel online can be a frustrating business, leading even the most patient computer user to the verge of keyboard rage.

To succeed you need to have a clear vision of what you want. You'll also need a fast internet connection and some time on your hands.

It's tempting to say that online travel booking is best done from your work PC during your employer's time. But of course you'd never dream of doing such a thing.

However, evidence from the House of Travel suggests this is exactly what happens. The busiest times on House of Travel's website are 8am-10am and 1pm-3pm.

WHAT CAN YOU BOOK?

There are literally thousands of travel-related websites in New Zealand and hundreds of thousands worldwide, offering everything from luxury cruises to cockroach-ridden backpacker accommodation.

Certainly simple flight booking is popular with the public. In one month Air New Zealand's website had 500,000 individual visitors, according to NielsenNetratings.

Aggregation websites, which include more than one airline as well as other services such as packages, cars and hotels are in their infancy here in New Zealand. But competition is hotting up with the launch of Houseoftravel.co.nz in September and the official launch last week of Zuji.co.nz.

If you're looking to book a bach, motel or hotel room, or bed and breakfast accommodation, Jasons and the AA also have good websites, or you can choose specialist websites such as Holidayhouses.co.nz, Kiwistays.com and Bookabach.co.nz.

When booking holidays online, you're not limited to New Zealand websites. Last year we bundled our children into a campervan and travelled around the American states of Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. We booked a cheap return fare to Los Angeles from here and then arranged internal flights to Salt Lake City and hotels through Travelocity.com, the US travel giant.

In the past we've also used US-based Expedia.com and Orbitz.com to plan and book holidays as well as leading European websites, such as Lastminute.com and eBookers.co.uk.

As a bargain hunter, my favourite international travel website is Priceline, which offers reverse auctions. You name the price and wait and see if you get an offer to match your price.

The US travel industry uses Priceline.com to offload excess flights, rental cars and hotel rooms. You need to be flexible as you can't name hotels or airlines and are bound to accept deals that fit your general criteria. You do get a choice of hotel level and in the case of flights you can specify non-stop. But you can't name the time of the day.

If you do have this flexibility, the savings can be immense. A friend of mine booked a London hotel for £29 ($76.50) a night through the website's British arm ( Priceline.co.uk). The rack rate for that hotel was £140 ($370).

The disadvantage of using foreign websites is that there's no local customer service here in New Zealand.

RESEARCH REIGNS

Online travel sites aren't just about booking - the internet excels in researching holidays. If you're planning a trip within New Zealand, Government and local body tourism websites such as NewZealand.com and Dunedinnz.com are mines of information.

The more adventurous your travel horizons, the more valuable the internet becomes. When I decided to research a holiday in Bariloche, Argentina I visited google.com, and within two clicks I was looking at a piste map of the Cerro Catedral skifield.

Numerous websites vied to provide me with hotel accommodation in the Patagonian town but I chose to flick an email direct to Villahuinid.com to ensure that the owner could bank my holiday dollar direct.

The websites Patagonias.net and Patagonia-Argentina.com were packed with ideas of what to do in Bariloche and surrounds. At both sites I read about a stunning lake and road crossing over the Andes to Puerto Montt in Chile and I could book the excursion at Ripioturismo.com. Needless to say the last time I visited Bariloche, 10 years ago, none of this was possible.

Travellers can and do book every last detail of a trip on the internet before they leave home - but they're the tenacious ones. If emailing an Argentine hotel direct isn't your thing, some travel agents are willing to book obscure holidays online for customers.

If a holiday is not available through its regular suppliers, Flight Centre will book online for an "administration fee". So you could, if you wanted, book a trip into the Darien Gap, one of the world's most inhospitable areas (thanks to terrain, jungle and gun-toting guerrillas), with Panamanian tour operator Anconexpeditions.com simply by walking into your local Flight Centre.

WHICH ARE THE BEST BOOKING SITES?

All of New Zealand's leading airlines have online booking sites.

Houseoftravel.co.nz has a homegrown online booking service offering 17 different airlines as well as packages. The site is linked into its House of Travel's branches, so if you can't find what you want online you can ask for a real person to contact you by email or phone. The websites Itchyfeet.co.nz and Travelonline.co.nz also offer some online booking.

The hugely impressive Zuji.co.nz travel site has been officially available in New Zealand since last week. A joint venture between 15 Asian airlines, it was brought to New Zealand by Gullivers Pacific. And even before it was officially launched, consumers who stumbled across it could book online.

US-based Travelocity powers the site. Having used Travelocity for several years, I didn't need to be sold on Zuji.co.nz. It took me just 30 seconds to find a flight to book from Dalaman in Turkey to Istanbul. And if all goes wrong, there's a Zuji.co.nz office at Gullivers to sort out the problem.

What Zuji.co.nz lacks is dynamic packaging, which allows you to get hotel, hire car and flight all at once, as you can with Travelocity's competitors in the US, Orbitz and Expedia. But Gullivers says this will be available first quarter next year.

Which style of online booking you prefer is really down to personal taste. House of Travel's links with its high street stores will win it friends. ItchyFeet's irreverent approach to selling travel (using language such as: "De Catch" when describing packages) has gained it a loyal following. The airlines are quick and easy to book with. And for tech-heads and serial travellers who know their stuff Zuji.co.nz will likely capture their imagination.

The most popular Kiwi travel site, according to AC Neilsen's Netratings research, is airnewzealand.co.nz. Next is the Government's NewZealand.com with XtraMSN.co.nz/travel in third place. The XtraMSN site includes search boxes for a number of other companies including Air New Zealand, Redballoondays.co.nz and the AA, which means that you can kill several birds with one stone.

The Herald's travel site, nzherald.co.nz/travel, was eighth so this story is bound to be widely read.

DO YOU SAVE MONEY?

The answer to this is "sometimes". When online booking first launched the promise was of cheaper prices.

Certainly cheap deals can be found - low-cost airline Freedom Air, for example, offers cheaper deals online than it does by telephone.

When I tried to book a flight to Sydney for the weekend of November 12-14, I found a deal with Itchyfeet.co.nz for $298 plus taxes and levies. When I called Flight Centre and other travel agents pretending to be a customer I failed to find such a good price.

Friends of mine have netted some great bargains from Wotif.com, which specialises in last-minute accommodation deals.

Travel agents have cottoned on to the public's belief that online is cheaper and many offer price matching.

Flight Centre is willing to match New Zealand-based internet fares, including those of Zuji.co.nz.

In our time-poor society, one of the key reasons to book online is not to save cash, but to book when it suits you. That may be outside of normal office hours.

In my case a call or visit to a travel agent during normal offices hours can be a nightmare with my two youngsters in tow. But once they're tucked in bed I can surf and spend to my heart's content.

WHO BUYS TRAVEL ONLINE?

According to a study by Massey University people in higher income brackets are more likely to buy their travel online. Ironically, they're the ones who can most afford to pay a premium for a good travel agent.

WHAT'S THE DOWNSIDE?

My biggest frustration with online travel sites is that they assume you know where you want to go so offers are organised by destination, not by holiday genre.



If you're looking for a child-friendly holiday, a golf holiday, or one suitable for older people, but are flexible about destination, these sites don't serve you well.

That is a criticism the House of Travel accepts and promises to correct in future versions of its site.

On the other hand, a good travel agent will get to know what you and your family like to do on your holidays and should use his or her knowledge of the travel industry to find you something suitable.

But a good travel agent can be hard to find.

When I visited my local House of Travel I wasn't exactly welcomed in when I scratched my head and said I wanted to go "somewhere in the South Pacific".

The agent handed me a brochure for Fiji and told me that everyone went there because it "is really cheap at the moment". And even though I was carrying one pre-schooler on each hip at the time, he didn't even point out which resorts were best suited for children.

TECHNOLOGY TURNOFF

When it comes to using the internet, I'm no Luddite. I have a fast connection and I've been online at some point almost every day for the past seven years. Yet when booking travel online I'm never a million miles from putting an axe through my keyboard.

That's because most travel sites are slow, have user-unfriendly design or simply crash at crucial moments. When I tried to book a simple Auckland to Wellington return fare I ran into difficulties. Air New Zealand's booking engine crashed on me.

Two days later I was in the process of booking the same flight and realised I needed to call friends to confirm first. By the time I'd finished the phone call Air New Zealand's site "timed out", meaning I'd taken too long and I had to start from scratch.

Why couldn't it at least have saved my itinerary so I could click once and see if the flights were still available?

When I tried to send a booking request form to the House of Travel I ended up in a vicious circle.

The site wouldn't send off my form because I hadn't selected my local House of Travel branch. But each time I clicked on "Devonport" I got a frustrating message that read: "We're really sorry, but your session has timed out. Please start again."

In fairness, the website was launched only in the middle of September and - as anyone who's ever worked with technology knows - there are always teething problems, and they are working on it.

CUSTOMER SERVICE NIGHTMARES

One of the nightmares of booking online is that if you make a mistake you may be stuck with your tickets.

Houseoftravel.co.nz staff recall one incident where a customer had booked a flight with a return date more than six months after the departure date. Staff at the company's "web outlet" department, who check all bookings, called the woman and corrected her mistake. Had the booking been through a foreign website she might have been out of luck.

Both Houseoftravel.co.nz and Zuji.co.nz sell themselves as having New Zealand-based customer service but it's too soon to see if they live up to the promise. Hopefully, both will have learned from the experiences of foreign operators who in the early days were soundly criticised for poor offline customer service.

Another downfall is the lack of site advice.

Some sites, including Zuji.co.nz and Itchyfeet.co.nz, have live online customer assistance. But when I tried to use both mid-morning on a Tuesday, neither was online (admittedly Zuji had not officially launched).

Mark Ottaway, managing director of ACNielsen's Netratings, says the frustrations of the internet mean many people use it for research, but pick up the phone to make the booking. Most online travel agents accept that, to turn surfers into purchasers, they need to provide a call centre.

In theory, the House of Travel has taken this one step further by giving you the option of building an itinerary online and sending it to your local branch to complete. But in my case the system broke down.

THE FINAL WORD

Despite my frustrations, I will be booking my next holiday online. I'm most likely to use Zuji.co.nz for long haul, and Houseoftravel.co.nz for internal flights and short-haul packages. But I'll certainly check out Itchyfeet.co.nz and Wotif.com before coughing up my money.