Booking accommodation is becoming extremely simple. Mobile apps such as
Booking.com, AGODA, and Kayak tie into a credit card pre-entered in your
account and automatically bill and place reservations. Bookings can be made
the day of and apps provide reviews, photos and map locations. No more need
for a Lonely Planet for hostel reviews!
Several of these apps can still be a bit buggy, and booking via a web
browser on the phone can be pretty unusable in terms of text entry and
entering contact and billing details. There are a number of competing apps
with different hotels and costs. Some of these don’t handle their own
bookings and redirect to other web interfaces.
As recently as 10 years ago this was pretty much a nightmare. Only
high-priced hotels would accept online reservations in some places and
doing it from an app was impossible. You could call ahead, but you needed
to know where to call first and it was hard to compare items and navigating
international dialing prefixes could be challenging.
I personally remember when I was visiting a small city in Japan in 2004. My guidebook had a hostel listed that was in my price range. I had no way to call them in advance, and I wasn’t sure they spoke English. With my paper map in hand I traversed the subway to get to the right neighborhood and then emerged into the pouring rain to find the hostel. Street names were in kanji and street numbers where nowhere to be found. Several locals took pity on me and helped me navigate. It turned out that the hostel had been out of business for a year. I walked into the nearest high-priced hotel and went to sleep. A simple online booking system would have avoided this problem entirely
BETTER DESIGNS FOR THE FUTURE
There needs to be more consolidation in this space. Just like Amazon is the
unified ordering system which provides a seamless user experience and
stability, hotels, and possibly travel bookings need this. More
one-click-ordering and less focus on payment methods. The web-based
redirects are clumsy and error-prone and should be replaced with native app
functionality. In general, there seems to be an interesting lack of
increased quality for more expensive hotels and the UX of more affordable
locations in some countries is better value for money.