They're quite different from my side of the family, but the biggest thing is that they've never been big planners. Everything is by the seat of their pants. If you're like that, you're probably OK with taking one of the first three SEO-optimized search results and making it work.
Meanwhile, I'm not booking anything until I have a proposed itinerary.
Frequently it isn't that google flights on a phone doesn't find the same flight, its that it is much easier to figure out the tradeoffs with more screen real estate. E.g. I can see that a flight is cheaper, but it involves mixing airlines, and a terminal change that I probably can't trust on a tight schedule in winter.
I still do everything important on a computer and wouldn't book the flight on a smartphone, but that probably says more about my age than anything else.
But I'm too much of a penny pincher..
But I do often only pre-book the first night/s accom, then book the rest as I travel and know where I will be when. But I do travel with my laptop, and often will park up somewhere and hotspot it, to find that days accom. (+ I get cash back deals on computer)
For me, not knowing those things and figuring them out on the spot is part of why I love vacations, and going through review of neighborhoods or figuring out the exact place where to stay would remove a lot of the fun.
But I couldn’t do it, especially with the presence of which I’ll call “expectations of planning” in my immediate circle. Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.
Yeah, when traveling with others who do like/need to plan I'll go with their plans and flow unless it gets too boring. When traveling with my wife I'll even stick around even if I'm bored.
> Some people want the best possible experience
I mean, I do too! :) Just different methods of getting there.
> can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research
Man, just daily life must be tough if they're feeling FOMO from such low stakes situations, I couldn't handle that myself :/
> Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.
The majority of such people perform what I call “checkbox vacationing”. It’s not about actually enjoying any particular thing, it’s just about checking the boxes of whatever some online list says is the current “best XYZ”.
If I'm spending thousands on plane tickets and hotels, and taking time off from work, and I know I'll likely never visit a place again (because there are so many other places to visit), I can't understand not doing some basic research on the things that the area is famous for, to visit those things. But whatever, you do you.
It's funny, I'd say the same to you! :)
How often do you sleep over on the couch or floor of strangers homes, waking up when they wake up, participating in something that isn't overflowing with tourists already? Or got to experience how a day is for someone who works and lives in the place you're visiting for the first time?
Granted, it's not for everybody, but we both feel the same about each other, which hopefully means we at least enjoy our own lives, even if we wouldn't like each others. But I won't say you're lazy just because you don't try to truly experience other cultures when you travel, we just have different ways of traveling and enjoying life. And that's OK, as long as you enjoy what you do, and I enjoy what I do :)
You have the strangest travel goals I've ever heard of.
Fortunately I don't have to sleep on floors when I travel. That sounds awful.
I can't imagine anyone would want to "experience how a day is for someone who works and lives" in my life, they'd be sitting on a couch in my office watching me type in lines of code all day. Thrilling.
I spent 3 months living and working in a city abroad (again, coding), so yeah, I know what it's like. We travelled all around the region, saw and did amazing things instead of "winging it", and the horror - there were tourists there too! Avoiding tourists just to avoid tourists means you missed out on things that are interesting, because why, you don't like being around other people? But I don't actually care why or how you travel, you do you.
Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes? If you have the choice to use a real computer for this, then why not? It's not like booking a big trip is something you do while sitting on a bus.
Then of course there's accommodation, itineraries, visas, trip research...
But i take issue with this concern:
> Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes?
My iphone (safari) auto-fills almost all of those details. It’s also likely that semi-frequent travelers have an account with the airline in question, so passport and TSA precheck info is pre-saved too.
It’s simply a non-issue in my experience.
The idea of manually typing any of this stuff in is very old fashioned.
Now I am wondering if this is Safari/Chrome thing and not a mobile/desktop thing.
Certainly if the autofill doesn't work and I do need to to type it in, the PC is way easier. I'm thinking international travel for 5 people - all my responsibility and I don't want to get held up half way across the world when no one has slept for a day, work visas beign contingent on correctness, etc.
I'd be more surprised if they had a desktop than a laptop.
- the desktops in question tend to be "exclusively" used by one member of the household
- the desktop owners usually also have a laptop
- the desktop-owning households are well in the minority of households I know
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/computer...
Let’s not forget that a plurality exists.
But that says 1000% more about impulsivity coming to my rescue, with reckless disregard for the risk of regret at the first sign of boredom, than any trust in mobile interfaces.
I didn't (and would never) book the trip that cost a fraction of that on a phone or pad.
Not only do they type it in, they let them save their information...
To figure all this out, I’m going to need to keep notes across several browser tabs, likely while communicating asynchronously with whoever else is going on the trip. All of this is dramatically easier with an actual computer.
Use an Android or Linux laptop, pay less.
Not kidding, pricing is based on these bullshit assumptions more than you might think. For the German market, for example, it's also cheaper to buy tickets on Thursday evening around 22:00-23:30. Paid around 400$ less for a 2k trip, multiple times, reproducibly, not depending on seasons or years.
But if you want to shuffle times/dates/different choices of flights to find the "best one" (which does not mean the cheapest one with weird connections)
Do take a look at what people from developing countries go through - sometimes you cannot even get a visa without all your lodging booked and a confirmed return flight ticket.
Like, have you tried doing data entry on a phone? Who is using these products?
I have a bunch of scripts to help and wrote a custom web scraper to pull the data, automating much of this, but much is still quite manual.
there's resource rot it seems, desktop/web have less than the phone, and it shows
hp printer/scanner app is way leaner than anything they've ever released on windows (not saying much but still), same for my bank app it's a bit faster, and better designed (features and ui)
None of the mobile finance apps I've used even have half the reporting ability I want (presumably because users don't care, and not because it wouldn't fit on the screen).
Me, I was in on the ground floor with laptops (and desktops) and so prefer them. Kids though?
You narrow down your options by having knowledge like "I have points on these airlines so I want to fly on Star Alliance which has partners that fly out of (quick check) these airports, so let's plan the itinerary in this way..."
I just got back from traveling the last 3 months (40 flights, 6 continents) and planned all of it from my phone. From flights, to hotels, to visas.
And it's simply better than a laptop. 4 tabs in 4 browsers means you're distracted, you're not pruning useless information, you don't know what you don't know.
I do 95% of my work on my phone too, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
People used to do it in their heads.
Einstein, Tolkien, Hawking, Newton, Shakespeare, Euclid, Archimedes.
With paper being an storage medium they occasionally saved to :)
> (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip)
Heck I was doing EXACTLY that on an iPhone while loafing at a friend's just now, because I wanted to make the most of my time and I don't want to carry my laptop/iPad anywhere.
Lightweight XR glasses would be the best of both worlds.
these days only idiots would do so on pen and paper only
For a lot of people, time is more valuable than money.
They get on their phone and complete a task and move on.
Spending an hour comparing a dozen tabs on a computer to save $30 on a flight is less important than spending that time with their loved ones.
I would understand if you saved $500 or more. If you are frequent flyer, that would add up.
"I don't get why the kids these days book their travel using an app" is this generation's "I don't understand why people don't use travel agents". There are better sources of information and that information has moved to walled-garden mobile apps.
I laughed. Just used a travel agent.
If you’re not getting paid to promote them, you’re not a shill. Honest recommendations are welcome!
Searching the internet on a phone feels like exploring the world through the eye of a needle.
Maybe one in 100k does