Thisistravel.co.uk

Monday, 12 Aug, 2002 0

Review by Adrian Mann, owner of Adrian Mann Design, providing independent reviews and analysis of travel web sites in the UK.

This is Travel is an independent holiday website from the publishers of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, the Evening Standard and Metro newspapers.

Overall
It’s a full-service travel site, offering a wide variety of travel products – from package holidays to UK weekend breaks. There’s also a wide variety of other services such as weather, insurance, destination guides and travel news and articles, all of which are accessible from the home page. It does look a bit cluttered, and it takes a few minutes to just read everything on this one page, but the design is good, and the graphics and layout make it easy to see what’s on offer.

Content
Selecting and booking travel is the most important function of the site, and you’re invited to ‘Book it with TravelAds’ – its sister site. TravelAds works differently from the majority of travel search engines. Travel advertisements and offers from a range of companies are submitted, and presented in a searchable form. The best way to see how it works is to try a few searches. For example, searching for ‘Lakes and Mountains’ in North or Eastern Europe gives 5 links to companies providing Norwegian cruises, city breaks in Austria and tours of the Alps. Click on a link and you can see the advertisement and the offers they have, along with sample prices and contact details. Click on the advertisement and you’re taken to the website of the company, which opens in a new window. The range of advertisers is very wide, from brand-name operators to specialist outfits you’ve probably never heard of. Overall it seems to function well enough, but is probably best suited to those who are researching a trip rather than looking for a last minute deal that can be booked online.
If you’re looking for something specific, there are 11 categories to choose from, including family holidays, over 55’s, cruises and short breaks. The range for each category looks good, so there should be something of interest whatever you’re looking for.
The content of the rest of site is comprehensive to say the least. It seems that everything that appears on other sites has been included here, from message boards, picture galleries and health advice, to a sun factor calculator, phrase books (in Italian, French and Spanish), competitions and a newsletter.
Destination information is provided by DG & G, and while brief, it does cover the major points and has links to more detailed pages, and can also be added to a personal ‘Holiday Organiser’, which will retain addresses, pictures and destination pages. This feature requires registration, but this is quick and easy to do. Once registered, you can use the Organiser, message boards, send in reviews and enter competitions. DG & G also provide the accommodation reviews.
There does seem to be a liking for pop-up windows, showing offers and advertisements from a number of operators. Pop-ups are at best annoying, but are even worse when the content doesn’t fit the window, and the scroll bars and resize are disabled.

Summary
An interesting approach from what might otherwise be regarded as ‘just another travel site’. It might be looked at more like a portal than a site where you could research and book travel, as most of the functionality is provided by external sites and operators. This is not a bad thing, so long as you don’t mind being presented with advertisements at every opportunity.
It’s bright and cheerful, the quality of the information is good, but while it functioned well on PC browsers, it may cause problems for Mac users – some basic functions were unusable and even crashed the browser. At times it was slow, especially when retrieving search results pages and hotel reviews, and pages were occasionally unavailable due to ‘maintenance downtime or capacity problems’.
However, it’s worth a look, and while I can’t imagine it replacing the likes of Thomas Cook or The First Resort, it makes an interesting addition to the online travellers toolkit.