Category Archives: Travel

Kayak Mobile

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Kayak.com is a relatively new travel meta-search engine which searches over 120 travel sites including all the major airline sites except Southwest, many hotel chain sites as well as travel booking sites like Orbitz and CheapTickets. It includes a lot of sites you might not think of searching like AsiaRooms.com or Wegolo.com which specializes in European budget airlines. Kayak is purely a search engine like Google – it doesn’t do bookings. You search for the lowest fare or for a … Continue reading →

HopStop Mobile

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To me at least, public transit and the mobile web could make a very enabling combination. When I’m out on the streets and want to get somewhere, I’d love to be able pull out my phone and bring up a little map showing the route from my current location to a nearby bus or subway stop along with step by step directions on how to get to where I want to go on the transit system – including any transfers … Continue reading →

Mobile SeatGuru.com

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SeatGuru.com now has a mobile site. Thanks to Kevin Tofel at James Kendrick’s jkOnTheRun.com for discovering this site and sharing it. SeatGuru, which has been on the full web for five years, tells travelers something they never know enough about until too late – airline seats. The site has tables comparing seat width and pitch and in-flight amenities for all the aircraft types in the fleets of 29 airlines. The best part of SeatGuru are the detailed seating charts which … Continue reading →

Go2

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Go2 is a site with great potential marred by a clumsy UI and somewhat slow response. Still if you are patient and learn it’s quirks it can be very useful. It’s location based search that since 1999 has worked on any phone. And it’s worked in spite of the mobile providers reluctance to expose their LBS data to mobile web developers or users. Of course, the reason it works is because it relies on the old fashioned method of the … Continue reading →

Real-Time Transit Information

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In Japan, where the mobile web is much more widely used than in the US and Europe, real-time transit tracking is a very popular web based mobile application. If you use public transit it’s easy to see why. I’m sure you have had the experience of waiting and waiting for a bus and wondering if it will even come. Mobile access to real-time transit arrival and departure information has actually been possible in some US cities for several years. Recently, … Continue reading →

Southwest Airlines

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Back when I wrote a four part post on Mobile Transcoding Services I used the Southwest Airlines web page as one of the sites to test transcoding services. At that time Southwest was the only major US airline that did not have a mobile web site. Southwest has finally noticed the growing demand for mobile travel information. Their site is rather basic at this point with only a single function, Online Check-in. This is a very usefully and important feature … Continue reading →

Hotels.com

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A while back I posted about hotel search and booking sites and why I think they are a natural for WAP. It seems that Hotels.com agrees as they have launched a WAP site which comes in both WAP1 (wml) and WAP2 (xhtml) versions. The UI is well optimized for mobile devices in some areas but breaks down badly in several critical areas. As you can see in the first image, numeric accelerators are used and there are a number of … Continue reading →