Bing Travel fails to deliver

By Stephen Withers
Friday, 05 June 2009 08:08

Home IT

Bing arrived with a bang, and now the initial fuss has ebbed Microsoft is adding features. Bing Travel provides airfare and hotel search, but falls down in some important respects. Bing Travel combines tools that came with Microsoft's acquisition of Farecast with content from MSN Travel.

One of the highlighted features of Bing Travel is Price Predictor, which is supposed to give a "buy now" or "wait" indicator to help people get the best airfares.

The trouble is that Price Predictor is severely restricted and doesn't even work on one of the world's busiest routes (Melbourne-Sydney).

Price Predictor apparently only works for certain cities and for flights within the US or between the US and Europe and the Caribbean. And even there it's restricted to round trips, economy fares, and a certain time horizon.

Excuse me, Mr Bing - it's bing.com, not bing.us!

Another issue is that when you click on a "Book with" link, you may be redirected via a doubleclick.net URL. That happens with orbitz.com links (and possibly others) and presents an unnecessary problem for anyone behind a proxy that's set to block notorious tracking sites.

What else is good and bad about Bing Travel? Please read on.