HUBMASTER'S
CHOICE
FOR
NOVEMBER 1996
World travelers using the web to plan their expeditions should now say "Cha-ching!" and proceed directly to the very terrific Travel Quest web site and get about the business of planning. If you are still bothering to read this, let me say a few things about the site before pointing you the way.
Travel Quest is big, covering almost every pertinent issue in impressive depth. The subject categories of Airlines, Hotels, Car Rentals, Cruise Lines, Destinations, Rail Services, Vacations/Tours, and Travelers Info are each chock full of useful features, information, and links. TQ is also good looking and well laid out. Kudos to Scottsdale's Performance Quest International for this exceptional effort.
The Travelers Info area was my particular favorite. Among its better features is the Xenon Labs Currency Exchange. Here you can make conversions for many of the world's various currencies. Want to know how many Venezuelan Bolivars there are to Dutch Guilders? Easy! Just enter an amount and pick Bolivars to Guilders and bang! there it is. You even get the date when the rates where last updated.
The Airlines, Hotels, and Car Rentals areas also offer connections to reservations systems. I gave the airline system a test run and it was functional and simple.
There was one curiousity here. Near the beginning of the reservation process the choice is offered for you to proceed thru TQ's secure server or not. Much of what follows from this point doesn't demand security, however. You might want to insure privacy in planning, but it didn't occur to me that my intention to fly home for Christmas would be of interest to anyone other than my mother. The oddity is that if you don't choose the secure route (and the choice isn't as explicitly offered as it might be) you can procede all the way to the point of giving out your credit card number without encryption. Why even offer unsecure credit card transactions if you can offer secure? It seems bad practice to me.
Still, this is a minor quibble with a major work. The site has been on the web since only July of this year and yet could rightly claim to already be near its goal of becoming "a world leader in on-line travel and hospitality services." Enough now said by me. Check it out for yourself.
Visit the Travel Quest and Performance Quest International web sites.
