Tuesday, December 30, 2003

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First Hotwire Success: for Car Rental As previously recorded, I've been a Priceline doubter, and only slightly less skeptical of its competitor, Hotwire. I now have my first recorded use of Hotwire, though, and it was quite impressive. A week ago, I had made reservations for a 6-day, full-size rental through Budget, for $189 (base rate). I searched quite a bit, and that was the best I could find. Then just today, I thought of checking Hotwire. Lo, they delivered me a $139 rate--$50 cheaper! And it even turns out--you don't discover the vendor until you have confirmed--that it is Budget! Of course, the reservation is non-cancellable, but seeing as it is only 48 hours before my trip, I think that is a very good bet. Hmmm, that prompts and idle thought...I would think the rental-car and hotel companies might want to impose a 10-day advance requirement on Priceline/Hotwire, to try to price-discriminate against business travelers, the way the airlines do. Otherwise, it seems like a fail-safe strategy will be to book a standard, cancellable reservation in advance, then check Hotwire 48 hours before your trip, most likely find and book something better, then go cancel your original res. So not only is Hotwire cannibalizing the higher-rate business for the hotel and car rental companies, this kind of usage could substantially disrupt their capacity planning (what with all the canceled reservations). 11:27:50 AM    comment []

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Color Coding Months in Outlook All-too-frequently, I will enter an Outlook appointment for the wrong date. Most often, it will be the right date for the wrong month. This usually happens because I left my calendar "open" to some future month. I think there is an easy useability improvement that would help save me from this careless error: color-coding each month. So, if I were used to looking at December's dark blue background, and went to enter in January an appointment meant for December, I would immediately notice January's bright green background, before I could follow-through on my error. My second most common form of this error is to enter an appointment for the right day of the wrong week. A similar solution here would be to have a background pattern of some sort (think cross-hatching schemes, though I'm sure the graphic artists at MS could do much better than that) to denote the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th weeks of each month. 10:12:01 AM    comment []