Up until now, the travel apps available either didn’t provide flight, hotel, and rental car info, or they did provide it, but didn’t allow you to book from the app. It seems they were just waiting to release the perfect one that makes it possible to do it easily and quickly from an app, without having to go back to Safari to finish the deal.
The interface for the Travelocity app couldn’t be any easier to manage. To find flights, just enter your departure and arrival airports, the number of people traveling, and the dates. While most apps have little calendar icons you click to bring up dates to select, this app pops up with a calendar to start with and has you drag the dates of your travel. If your travel is a long way out, it can get a little tedious, as while you can forward through the months, it selects that as your ending date, and keeps your beginning date being immediate. It takes dragging through the months individually to get the dates right. It’s a minor irritance, however.
Depending on when and where you plan to travel, the flight list can get a little difficult to sift through with so many different options. For this reason, it offers a filter that allows you to make choices of non-stops or multiple stops, travel times, and airlines.
Selecting a leg of a flight brings up all the standard pertinent information. What’s great is that the price is displayed very large for all the flights. Sure, the number of stops, the flight duration, and the departure and arrival times are important. But most of all, we want to know how expensive it will be. That’s the bottom line.
After you have selected both your departure and arrival flights, it displays all the information in one window for you before purchasing. Without having to go through several different windows, it’s all right here to insert the credit card information, traveller information, etc. You can also log in to your Travelocity profile from this screen. And of course, there’s that cute little Travelocity gnome to help point the way.
Hotels are booked the same way as flights. Insert the destination city and dates of your travel, along with the number of people in your party, and it brings up a list of hotels. Again it displays the price per night as the largest in the list, and also has decent-sized pictures of the property. Clicking on a hotel brings up an even larger picture of the property, along with plenty of information to make an informed decision.
Rental cars are found the same way as flights and hotels. It simply asks for the pickup location, dates, and times. This, too, has sort and filter options. I did it by car type. This was obviously a dream vacation I was planning, as I don’t see me coming up with that type of money to book a convertible. But this app is for more than just amusement. It’s quite useful to be able to book everything for your trip in one shot in an app. It’s enough to make me overlook the fact that the display will only work in portrait mode and not landscape. That’s just another minor inconvenience that can be easily overlooked.
