Online Booking Rant

roddydogs

Why when I try to book anywhere online, I have to have "Specific" dates, why cant they show availability over, say a few weeks so I can choose from that? really annoying.. Same with booking a place in this country.:mad:

Stevie_Palimo

Not sure what the issue is really as I can often find places at in between dates but as a general rule when booking something I would tend to have a date in mind that suits my needs.

renalt

Some listing websites have availability calendars. Mostly the cottage sites though.

spadoosh

roddydogs wrote: »

Why when I try to book anywhere online, I have to have "Specific" dates, why cant they show availability over, say a few weeks so I can choose from that? really annoying.. Same with booking a place in this country.:mad:

A hotel might have 50+ rooms, there might be 6 airports in the uk that go to that specific hotel on a daily basis, thats potentially 300 results for 1 day at one hotel. Then go to the thousands of hotels that might be in any given country.

If its frustrating you to look for holidays, i would recommend visiting a high street travel agents, they do the looking for you.

Tuesday_Tenor

I don't seem to have the same problem as you.

Possibly because the sites I use most are:

Easyjet. Where you can look at flights over three weeks (and longer, I think)

Booking.com. Where you can tick the box 'I don't have dates yet', get all the accommodation for a particular location, then when you've found accommodation you fancy, then put in dates at that second stage.

Cottages4you. Where you can search on a particular town, look at properties in detail, and view the availability calendar.

SW17

roddydogs wrote: »

Why when I try to book anywhere online, I have to have "Specific" dates, why cant they show availability over, say a few weeks so I can choose from that? really annoying.. Same with booking a place in this country.:mad:

It's usually down to technical limitations, particularly with hotels.

To go out to suppliers to check such a large number of dates on each search could crash one or both systems, or take an unacceptably long time to get a result.

The alternative is for the OTA to cache rates and availability on their system, which results in a faster search (and may enable the sort of calendar search you would like) but can mean that rates and/or availability are not completely up to date, depending how often the cache is refreshed (the sort of thing that many on here complain about with eDreams etc in relation to flights).

Some OTAs will use a combination of these 2 things, there are so many hotels and so many changes of rates/availability that it is hard to find a perfect solution, some sort of compromise is almost inevitable for most of them.

rachhh

Easy Jet Holidays let you search loads of destinations for X Nights between Dates A and B.
Also, on Skyscanner you can search 'Everywhere' by month, so you can find the cheapest places and dates to fly to a certain place.
There's also an app called Hitlist which is really good for cheap flights if you don't have a specific date in mind.

Hope this helps