Nice post. I was stayed in easyHotel and feel I have to reiterate just how tiny the ’small’ rooms are in this hotel…! But having read previous reviews we were well prepared. The only negative thing for us was the complete lack of any storage, except for 3 wall hooks. There was easily space for a drawer under the bed which would have gone a long way to easing the problem. As it was, we had our suitcase and clothes piled up in front of the door, which is definitely a fire hazard!

But with the negatives out of the way, I think this is a great place for a short visit to London. It’s within 5 minutes of Gloucester Rd Tube station and is well served by cafes, restaurants and shops. There’s also a Waitrose and Sainsburys really close by. The room was clean and warm, and the shower always had hot water whenever we used it. Plenty of towels The staff on the 24-hour reception were friendly and helpful. Vending machines for hot and cold drinks and snacks are handy.

Overall, I’d say this hotel is great value for money and in a really great location. I’d recommend this place for a fuss-free, short-stay in London. Personally, I wouldn’t want to stay for longer than a few days as there just wouldn’t be enough room for all my stuff! I also wouldn’t recommend it if you have any walking difficulties, there’s no lift here so if you’re in a small room you’ll be on the third floor, which is a bit of a hike if you’re unfit like me!

Being obligated to create a member account before I can get all the details of a (potential) booking.

This is to gather customer information for marketing reasons, but is by no mean obligatory and is down to the individual business.

Searching for hours for the cancellation fees of a hotel before I complete a booking.

Not sure why travel agencies wouldn’t like to show this information

Not knowing the total price of a booking before I filled out any personal information.

Now there is a good reason for this, airline, hoteliers what ever, can have different offers and pricing for children mainly so prices can’t be confirmed until dates of birth have been entered as each business classifies rate differently,

Not being able to use a booking engine with Firefox!

This shouldn’t be a problem, if travel agencies value there website frontend, 99% of browsers should work, but again other business contraints can come into this, budget for one.

Promotions that never match my holidays periods.

This is not limited to online travel booking

Getting an expired sessions of a search when being idle for a short period of time.

As prices/availability change all the time it is most probably a good thing that this timesout happens, as prices/availability may have changed, security should only really come into it after personal information has been entered

Chosing to book a flight, filling out ALL the personal information asked (including credit card number) and getting an error message saying it’s not available anymore (but still offered and listed on-site and on all travel meta search engines).

Each site may have it own cache as it not possible for all pricing to be live all the time, due to the millions if not billions of queries. Meta search engine may only be updated every hours or less because these are only marketing gateways to sellers of travel products.

Browsing a little deeper to know the services a hotel is offering, and not being able to get back to the result page I came from.

Page flow not thought out correctly

Picking an available hotel room, and discovering that was not a real time displayed availability and that an email that has been sent to the hotelier, who replies room is not available anymore for this period of the year.

Not all accommodation have live availability, is your nearest (non chain) hotel available to book online (through travel agency resellers).

Having to query availability/rates twice. Once for displaying the system cache of available hotels of the site, and another time for confirming the hotel is really available at that rate!

Because pricing is so complicated and there are billions of combinations of pricing it needs to be cached, if it wasn’t people would moan about page load times then.

All my comments are purely from my perpective of making these travel sites, but I do agree there are many annoynces and complications in online travel which reduces usability. A travel agencies site will only be as good as it’s supplier functionality, developers and budget.

Thanks
Liam

the message appears but can’t chat with the person from my device……