I spent most of last Saturday trying to book a vacation for December. Because we are flying during a popular time, the discounted fares are going fast. I used Expedia, two airline sites and Travelocity to compare flight options.(while my sister comunicating via the IM was at Yahoo travel) I also phoned two airlines directly. My experience with Expedia where I finally ended up booking a flight will be detailed in another review. Here is my experience with Travelocity.

The Home page is a somewhat busy looking but effective opening which includes portals for flights, lodging, auto rental, cruises and more. There are some ’’advice’’ areas for travel planning and cruising as well as a number of ads. You can customize some aspects of the site if you join. (fare watcher etc.) There are maps and driving directions available but not other features such as currency converters.

I immediately went to the flight area and entered the departure and destination cities and dates. There was some initial difficulty with the departure city name. This site doesn’t offer the ability to find and use the airport codes from the regular travel search. So although I knew the code-I wasn’t able to use it. After a relatively slow loading time, a page of flights appeared. They were arranged by price with Travelocity’s preferred airline listed first. As I investigated each, all of the first 5 were unavailable at the prices listed. I then tried to search by lowest fare without travel dates. This produced a much larger list. You choose one and are led to a page to choose a departure date. If you can actually find one. you are then taken to return flight dates. I never successfully found both so I can’t say where you are taken next. This hunting method takes forever. I also tried returning back to the search page and making new combinations of dates. The search function requires you to go back to the original flight selection page each time. (In some others there is a box on the page to do a new search with different parameters.) Again, the first options shown were always unavailable.

As I said earlier, I was checking options through several sources at the same time. The airline I finally booked with was listed on Travelocity, but the same flight numbers and dates were only available at $50. more a ticket each.

One final note, I did my searching in the afternoon and came back to purchase my tickets the next morning. I wanted to make one final comparison using another destination airport. Travelocity wouldn’t let me search! Apparently your ability to search the site without becoming a member lasts only one day. I tried lodging and auto rentals as well and the ’’become a member page’’ always came up.