Tripping out with the iPhone and iPod touch
Two of the biggest names in online travel planning come to the iPhone and iPod touch. Today, Travelocity announced the iPhone optimized version of their airline flight reservation site, and last month Hotels.com released an iPhone interface for finding and reserving hotel rooms. Both sites are very quick to use and have some handy features making these very worthy of web clips for road warriors and vacationers alike.
The Travelocity iPhone site is fast and responsive, and offers big buttons to make navigating by tap very easy. Looking up a flight is almost quicker on the iPhone than it is on a desktop browser. The pull down menus and forms are intuitive and well designed for tapping. When you drill down into a specific flight’s details, you can easily see if a flight is delayed and by how long. You can also tap an icon to get a map to or from the airport, local weather, and security wait times. If you are not doing the flying and simply need to pick up or drop off an airline passenger, the Travelocity site offers quick access to gates and times, and security wait times. Both are available right from the home page.
You cannot book a flight from the iPhone Travelocity site, but there is a phone number on every page that you can tap to call once you have your information ready. For your personal trip information, you can sign into your personalized Travelocity trip planner, My Trips, from the home page as well. This requires that you already have a free Travelocity account set up, but does make it super simple to get to your saved itineraries.
If you need a hotel, the iPhone site for Hotels.com offers a quick way to look up available rooms. You can search for rooms by hotel name, airport, city, or landmark. The search results are sorted by price, and you can drill down into detailed room information which includes amenities, photos, maps and attractions, and guest reviews. You can book a room directly from the iPhone interface, and the forms are pretty short. But unless you are very adept and tap typing, it’s probably easier to tap call the toll free number from the home screen to book a room by phone. They guarantee the rates by phone will be the same as what is displayed on the iPhone site, and they boast no change or cancel fees as well.
Point your mobile Safari to the links below to access Travelocity and Hotels.com from your iPhone or iPod touch.
- Travelocity - iphone.travelocity.com
- Hotels.com - www.hotels.com/iphone
I use this incredible site called Tripit to manage my travel plans (www.tripit.com). It’s so great. You just forward all your confirmation emails for rental cars, flights, hotels, restaurants, etc. to a tripit email address. Tripit then combines all your travel plans into a single itinerary, but they add valuable content as well, like maps, local attractions, and entertainment. And you can check view your combined itinerary on the web or email. It’s a life saver.
Wow…such well written spam. Seriously, Tripit might be a decent site, but it doesn’t look very iPhone/Touch friendly. And, this is a website for iPhones and iPod Touches, so…