Inspire Me
I've been having a play with the new 'Inspire Me' section on the Easyjet website, and keep coming to the conclusion that it's got some fancy (but far too busy) graphics designed by some web developer who thinks he should be working for Pixar on an animation film, but in terms of effective use for the person who is thinking of pulling out their credit card is not actually that useful.
In particular, there's very little capacity to search carefully for something that might be useful
No way to enter specific dates or ranges of dates, besides "Spring/Summer"
No way to enter "out on Saturday, back on Sunday" - can only choose a 3 day weekend
Can't choose "All airports in London" - can specify only Gatwick, or Luton, etc...
Can't specify that you want a morning / afternoon / evening flight for outbound / return
Can't identify particular cities of interest (besides the very generic 'Nightlife' or 'Culture' icons)
Can't choose anything based on climate
Can't mix+match airports - e.g. out to Verona, back from Venice.
When drilling down to a specific destination, cannot see round trip prices for a range of dates
The main impression is that it's a bit like those ads in the weekend papers full of "Fly to destination XXX from Łalmost nothing" statements. Yes, the price is valid, but it's never what you actually want, and requires a lot more time digging around to find something given your own personal situation - e.g. can't go on the weekend of 10 June because it's Mum's birthday.
The result is that you end up being shown a picture of magical gold at the end of the rainbow, in the full knowledge that it is completely and utterly unobtainable, all the time while being surrounded by a long abandoned factory on some grim industrial site.
It all seems like something that someone in marketing has dreamt up to look cool and something they can boast about, but it's not actually that useful for searching for trips in a way that gives back concise and highly relevant search results. Skyscanner on the other hand have gone for a style that gives greater capacity to find the trips that might really be of interest.
As an alternate example, when using Google, imagine the website that you were looking for was actually on page 17 of the results, and that you had to read through 16 pages of garbage before you found anything useful.
Behind the scenes, any search for a trip is likely just a bit of SQL. (Note - SQL stands for 'Structured Query Language and is the dominant programming language on commercial database software systems)
Yes, adding more parameters makes the entry form longer, but search in a non-specific way and you get back large amounts of garbage that causes punters' eyes to glaze over. Search with specific parameters, and you get back much more relevant information.
The only thing in favour of the marketing people at Easyjet, is that the 'Inspire Me' section on their website is nothing more than a marketing tool, and that Easyjet knows they make profits out of people who can't be bothered to spend a lot of time searching for a cheap flight at a useful time and will instead get bored and give up early and settle for either paying a higher fare at a peak time or a lower fare at an off-peak time instead.
I don't know what specific technology Easyjet have running their systems, but surely their developers are capable of something better than this ?
Last edited by davidjohnson6; 2nd Oct 2012 at 19:41.