I’m off to the US soon, to Portland to  the Ubuntu Live event.

Now I have family living in the US, so I thought I’d book a flight from Paris to LA, then do the Portland leg as an internal US flight, stopping in LA a few days on one side of my intercontinental trip.

Easier said then done. It took me quite a while to get the right-priced tickets going at the right dates/times to make changing flights OK. Conceptually, it’s simple. This is what I wanted:

1. Fly from Paris to LA
2. Connect and fly through to Portland
3. Present at Ubuntu Live 
4. Fly back from Portland to LA
5. Stop over a few days, surf a bit, do the Californian thing for a while, then get a flight back to Paris

Now I can’t be the only one wanting to do something like this, but do you think it’s possible in any of the systems like Expedia, Lastminute.com etc? Not a chance. Not only does it want to offer me a full set of nights’stay in hotels in LA (I might want the night before the flight back, but not the rest), but I also have to manually sync up my departure & arrival times.

Of course the fact that I booked the flight for 1 person only, but made 2 seperate bookings means I need to select which itenerary I want, although, to me, it’s just one single trip.

 So I started thinking about all the other things that we have as services that are not quite there yet.

One of the other on-line services I use a lot are the bookstores. I most frequently use Amazon and Barnes&Noble, although I’ll shop anywhere if they can get me the latest Harry potter a day earlier.

Now what really impresses me about those sites is that in most cases (as long as you’re buying from them and not a 2nd hand seller via them), you can chop and change your order, add books or CD’s to it up until the day it ships. I’m pushed to think what more I’d want from them. (I know, out-of-print books - but that’s the hobby thing)

Now how can I have such a good experience with cheap articles (books), and a much worse experience with more expensive ones (the flights/hotels)? Surely there’s something going wrong here. I can’t believe that flight planning is more complex than shipping books, particularly as it’s the airlines themselves doing the difficult part of airplane maintenance. All Expedia needs to do is check prices, availability, and go. It’s not like they need to schedule the flights in themselves (although, wouldn’t that be nice?).

I suppose this is a plea to anyone thinking about providing any online service to, once you’ve built it, actually go and look properly how people are using it. And by that I don’t mean checking out the usage statistics, and seeing how browsing habbits change if you move the banner from the top to the left. I mean actually physically going out there and looking at what people do with what you give them.

We all have different ways of doing things. That makes us more interesting as a human race. Don’t force us into an unnatural pattern because the IT systems work better with it. Fix the problem.

Make machines work more human for us.

Pauwl