Adventures in Living

Sunday, March 07, 2010

how Bing travel search lies

So, I was just trying to buy airplane tickets to fly to England for spring break, and thought to use Bing.com, having read an article about how they are trying to beat Google in certain types of searches as a way to get a toehold on greater market share. Really, they are competing with Kayak and other meta-flight search websites. And Bing's functionality seemed to be better, easily filterable and a pretty good interface. But, the first time I used it, the flight I wanted to buy was unavailable - and I had to search for it all over again once Bing referred me to Orbitz or wherever to make the purchase. How stupid is that? Bing has all the flight details, date, number of passengers, etc, but they refer me to the beginning of the search so I can put all that in again by hand? And then, when I do that, the flight doesn't exist? Crappy user experience, but something I can let slide if it happens once.

So, when I went back to look at flights again today, I gave Bing another shot. I should have thought: "fool me once, shame on you...fool me twice, .... won't get fooled again" like our most recent former president. Same problems with flights not existing, after getting great prices for them from Bing. And they still aren't referring me to the actual location on websites where I can find that info, I have to put it all in again. So, I will be avoiding Bing like I do most Microsoft products, and for pretty much the same reasons - inferior quality with too much marketing shine.

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