Opinions on new website / business

[t0bytoo]

.

What kind of reservation engine are you using?

Just curious...

[adunn]

re: .

We're not using any reservation engine.
If you find a flight you like the look of, click on 'book now' and that takes you to the airline for that particular site and you book with them.

Cheers
A

[t0bytoo]

Oh. I get it.

So you're screen scraping the airline websites. Excellent idea.

An intelligent, fast search engine that brings up the *best* prices is the key to making it work.

And to speed up the searches, what about having some little bots running around airline websites maintaining a local database of flight deals that you could display - loud and clear - on the front page.

travelzoo.com have been doing this for about 5 years.

IMHO you are wasting your time with all the DHTML and 'content'. No one ever made a successful website out of looking pretty. Better to focus on the flight searches.

Toby

[adunn]

re: Oh. I get it

We do maintain a database of flight deals (under the Information menu -> Farecaster) :

www.flitesite.co.uk/cache...ontinent=1

But this just contains flights that people have executed a search on over the past few days, rather than pulling huge amounts of information from the airline websites every day.

Cheers
A

[t0bytoo]

.

The gist of this thread has been that people have suggested/wondered if your site offers a particular feature, and you have responded that it does, and cut and pasted a link.

Doesn't this tell you something? That the user experience is lacking any kind of intuitiveness. i.e. a user logs onto the site, and fom the word go is confused.

e.g. What is a 'Farecaster'? I know now because you told me, but having a very cursory glance round the site (and that's all you can ever expect of a user), I had no idea such a thing existed.

How 'bout rethinking the navigation/homepage. Prob'ly not what you want to hear, but IMHO I don't think you're going to get anywhere with the site the way it is now.

[baileyir]

Well I think it looks and works pretty well myself. Nice bit of work that

[adunn]

Re: .

The whole point of the thread was (as you can guess from the title), I wanted peoples opinions - and they have been giving them - thank you.
I've taken these observations on board, and will be making changes based upon the comments.
Please keep them coming - this is the sort of thing I need to know!

Cheers
A