The last thing students want to stress about while balancing 8 a.m. final exams and lengthy papers is dealing with the hassle of arranging transportation home for the break. Amongst the stress and chaos of this final week of fall term, simple and convenient travel arrangements are only a click away.
From the comfort of residence-hall rooms, apartments or houses, students can tailor their travel plans via the Internet.
Internet travel booking might be the biggest transformational movement to hit the travel industry since deregulation in the 1970s. And like any other technological improvement, the popularity of arranging travel on the Internet has greatly increased the reliability of and options for booking travel, freshman Jessica Boock said.
“It’s easy to find the cheapest tickets online,” Boock said. “I [bought flights online] a few times a year in high school to find cheap tickets to national fencing tournaments.”
The increasingly widespread use of the World Wide Web for travel hasn’t been confined to air travel. “You can have tickets mailed to you, but you have to plan time for shipping,” said Jeannie Houser, records clerk at the Eugene Greyhound Station. “Or you can print out the confirmation number and bring it to the station to get your ticket. Then you won’t have to wait as long.”
Greyhound, like many travel providers on the Internet, offers specials available only to online customers as a benefit of buying tickets on the Internet.
Though specials are void during peak holiday travel periods from Dec. 15 to Jan. 3, students traveling before or after that time can find online discounts, Houser said.
In addition to the convenience of using the Internet for travel, lower prices are also a major draw. For students, saving a few bucks is often worth the hassle of taking a red-eye flight or dealing with several connecting flights.
Further cutting prices, airlines often reward loyal online customers by offering special deals through weekly e-mail updates.
By allowing consumers to customize travel schedules online, online ticket sales not only remove the hassle of the middleman, but eliminate the confusion of trying to explain ideal time frames and needs to travel agents, Boock said.
“It’s really easy to poke around and find the best price,” Boock said. “It’s more catered to your personal wants.”
Because smaller transportation companies can compete with national giants, prices are often kept low, travel agents say.
But travel agents concede that there is still room for improvement.
“People are coming to us and saying they found deals, but they don’t know how to book it or aren’t sure about putting their credit card information on the Internet,” said Annie Bolling, manager of Wilcox Travel and Cruise Company in Eugene. “It helps us if they have done research and come to us so we can explain the hidden costs.”