Expedia's Helpful Lift

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Expedia also offers slideshows and virtual tours of hotels and cruises, so customers can get a better idea of what the places they book look like. You can often find 3-D renderings of rooms' layouts. A new feature was added last year: Now, you can narrow down your hotel searches on Expedia by listing amenities that are important to you, such as a swimming pool or high-speed Internet access.

FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE.

The site will immediately tell you how many hotels meet all your requirements in a given city and then list them. A few other big travel sites don't tell you the total count of hotels that fit your requirements immediately. Expedia, once again, saved me some time.

I was also impressed by the quality of Expedia's content. Unlike many other Web outfits, operating on shoestring budgets, the site actually sends out writers to scout the world's airports for two days to write reviews, noting good areas for kids, the best restaurants, etc. Expedia also sends writers to review cruises, instead of getting that information from third parties.

Expedia's employees actually visit hotels and monitor media coverage and travelers' opinions to come up with their star ratings for hotels. Most other sites use third-party data that may or may not be as reliable. Even better, in early 2005 Expedia started to let travelers post their own reviews. Now it has more than 100,000 reader-submitted hotel reviews, covering everything from cleanliness to local eateries. That's a lot more reviews than you will find on most of its competitors' sites.

ONE-PLACE-FITS-ALL.

You'll find that a lot of people come to the site to book vacation packages, a service Expedia has dabbled in since 2001. In 2005, its research indicated that an average user saved $189 by booking a package instead of buying the various components separately.

I've seen sites that claim they can save vacationers a few bucks more. But here's my experience: When I searched for a flight-and-hotel package from Portland, Ore., where I live, to Las Vegas, Expedia came $11 ahead of Travelocity in the lowest-price race. But when I looked for airfare-and-hotel packaged to Los Angeles, Travelocity totally beat Expedia. Bottom line: Shop around.

This month, Expedia relaunched the "hip deals" portion of the site, offering themed destination packages for, say, romantic travel or all-inclusive vacations. The site is a good place to visit if you want a suggestion on where to go. However -- and this is the case with most other travel sites, too -- I found that most of these destinations were in Mexico. It seems Cancun can be thought of in all sorts of ways: as a romantic destination, an all-inclusive vacation. I would like to see more variety of places off the beaten path -- destinations other than Cancun and Las Vegas -- to choose from.

SAME OLD LOCATIONS?

Indeed, if you are veering off the beaten path, your Expedia experience might not be as excellent as otherwise. Being fascinated with giant tortoises, I wanted to find vacation packages to the Galapagos Islands. Tough luck. I looked through a list of destinations Expedia has in Latin America, and Galapagos wasn't even listed there. Most of the 15 destinations listed were, in fact, in Mexico.

Needing to find my Galapagos cruise, which wasn't listed on Expedia's activities page, I e-mailed Expedia's customer support, asking for help. The answer came back within 15 minutes, but it wasn't very helpful. The formal reply suggested I look on the activities page, which I already knew was empty.

My experience with customer service at Travelocity was much better: Though I got an answer back only the next day, the customer-service rep actually recommended a Galapagos cruise for me to consider and gave me a number to call to book a trip. Now that's the way to handle customer service!

Bottom line: Expedia has a ton of great information, cool functionalities, and good deals. But it never hurts to shop around.

Kharif is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com in Portland, Ore.