Expedia's Helpful Lift

The travel booking site offers a cornucopia of information and convenient features to make a trip easier to put together. But it has some limits

by Olga Kharif

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Lots of info about airports and destinations. Its "Best Price Guarantee" is helpful

The Bad: Features are easy to overlook. Online customer service was useless

The Bottom Line: Good offerings, but shop around, too

Reader Reviews

Expedia (EXPE), the world's largest online travel services site, attracts 25 million travelers a month for a reason: The site is jam-packed with useful features. The problem is, there are so many features and so much content -- in fact, I would argue that Expedia has more information of all sorts than any other online travel retailer -- that they're easy to overlook. Plus, the font on the links to them tends to be very small, adding to the issue. I've been using the site for years, and I didn't know many of these capabilities even existed.

Once you learn these features, though, they can make your life a lot easier. You don't have to go to other sites for weather forecasts, list of amenities at airports on your route, or driving directions. One example: In the "cars" section, you can hold your mouse over a location icon to find out where the rental car you're ordering is located. (Is it a shuttle ride away from the terminal, or is it downtown and a taxi ride away?)

You also get directions for how to get to the car rental place. Another nifty feature: Whenever you search for foreign travel, a currency converter link pops up. These capabilities, many of them introduced in the past six months, make booking travel more convenient.

PRICE GUARANTEE.

Nowadays, Expedia -- spun off from IAC/InterActive (IACI) last August -- needs all these features and content more than ever as it increasingly competes with airlines' and hotels' own sites, which now offer low prices directly to consumers. Old rivals like Travelocity and Orbitz have been adding new capabilities recently as well. And a wave of new rivals and comparison sites is washing ashore (see BW Online, 4/17/06, "Building Good Web Buzz"). This is the first in a series of travel site reviews, so we'll be looking at competitors soon.

Not to be outdone by competitors, Expedia has done lots of innovating lately. In January, the site introduced a feature called "Best Price Guarantee," found on the left-hand side of the home page. If you book a flight through Expedia but find a lower price elsewhere within 24 hours (the price must be at least $6 lower), Expedia will refund you the difference and give you a $50 coupon good for future bookings through the site. While rival Orbitz also offers the lowest-price guarantee, Travelocity, for instance, doesn't.

I like Expedia's colors and graphics that help users absorb and make use of all of the information found on the site. If you go to a tab labeled flights, you can find cheaper rates by checking a box in the search area that says: My dates are flexible. A calendar will pop up, showing flight prices for various dates near the one you entered (these prices are based on recent, similar searches done by other Expedia customers). The calendar's boxes come in different colors, with beige day boxes displaying the lowest roundtrip fares.

COOL MAPPING.

When you find a fare that you like, you can click on it to do an up-to-the-minute price search. Then, you might see another feature, launched in late 2005: An icon below some listed flights will tell you exactly how many tickets for that particular flight are left. So if you are booking to fly somewhere for the popular Memorial Day weekend, you'll know to hurry up. Alas, the calendar function only works for the most popular routes. Orbitz has a similar feature, a matrix, but it doesn't color-code its lowest fares. I liked the color coding -- it saved me time.

Expedia also does a good job using multimedia on the site. I went to the hotels tab at the top of the Web page and did a search for a hotel in New York City. The site gave me an option to see all of my search results on a map of New York, so I could narrow down my choices. Then I could zoom onto a particular area where hotels are marked with dots. I found this very convenient. And not many travel sites offer it. Travelocity, for instance, simply lists hotel search results.