Traveladvisoryservice.com

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

Traveladvisoryservice.com
The website of the Travel Advisory Service states that they are ‘The UK’s most comprehensive free travel information service’, and their mission is to provide a personal travel service, featuring the largest range of airfare and holiday operators on the internet.

Overall
The homepage is absolutely crammed to bursting with links, drop-downs, ads, search engines, scrolling text, animations, javascript – if you can think of it, they’ve got it! Consequently, the homepage takes an epic one minute and 30 seconds to download on a 56kb modem, and it’s not exactly sparkling with a broadband connection either. When it’s done, you’re faced with a bewildering array of choices. Thankfully there’s a site map that shows the full range of information and services, which is also useful for those with older, Netscape or non-java enabled browsers.

Content
It’s probably best to approach the site with a specific question in mind. It’s easy to arrive at the site and click about just to see what comes up, but this approach won’t get the best out of it. All the facilities you’d expect are here, such as online flight booking, hotels, car hire, insurance and so on. These services are mostly provided by third parties – for instance, Travelselect.com for flights, Holidayautos.com for car hire, WorldRes.com for discount hotels, Brochurebank.com for brochure ordering.
The vast majority of the content is actually provided by other sites; BAA for airport information, The Foreign and Commonwealth Office for travel advice, CNN for weather and so on. There are pages for just about every form of travel available, from city breaks, cruises and golf holidays, to honeymoons and safaris. Each subject page offers a selection of links to the relevant providers, and sometimes there are a couple of offers too.
The TAS Directory Quicksearch functions in a most peculiar manner. A search for ‘New York’ returned links to Air New Zealand, a spa resort in Austria and a hotel in Canary Wharf. ‘Munich’ gave a Holidayautos page with no search results matching the criteria, while access to the Advance Search was ‘Forbidden’. The Message Board is a little sparse, featuring just 39 posts, but this may become better frequented as time goes on.
There are other services provided by the site, such as the ‘Ask the TAS Experts’, where you can submit a travel-related question and have the answer e-mailed back to you. A recent user of this service asked for information on a working holiday visa for Australia, and received advice, a copy of the visa application form, and an airline recommendation saving £60 on the ticket price. I tried it out, and received 3 good recommendations for travel and hotels within 2 hours, on a Sunday! This facility alone makes it well worth consulting.

Summary
As a portal to other travel sites, it’s comprehensive – it should have something for at least 90% of the travelling public. As far as their own content goes, it’s a bit ‘Curates Egg’ – good in parts.
It’s not the slickest, fastest or best functioning site you’ll ever see. If you only have a dial-up connection, you may find it very slow, as all the pages are heavily populated by advertisements, graphics, animations and the like. Even with a fast connection, you’ll be spending a while waiting for the pages to finish loading. But, if you’re looking for a collection of travel links, definitely have a look. If you’re looking for advice and can’t find it anywhere else, give the ‘Ask the Experts’ service a try – you may be pleasantly surprised.