travelocity loses a customer
I’m not very savvy when it comes to finding the best deals on air travel. I needed to book a flight, and my plan was to try Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz to see who’d give me the best deal and just take that. Expedia was down for maintenance and said it would be back tomorrow; I guess they have to retool sometime, but I’m not waiting until tomorrow.
Travelocity’s site is FUBAR in my browser, Firefox. Ok, maybe not that bad, but bad enough to make it unusable by me. I use a 20-inch monitor, which I love, at its native 1600×1200 resolution. If I let websites decide what font size they’d like me to see, I’d spend a lot of time squinting at the screen. I set a minimum font size to avoid any such squinting. At Travelocity, this causes the options for flight/hotel/automobile to be covered up by the navigation menu. Also, their “From” and “To” input boxes seem to be covering up some important options.
This sucks for them, since I just used Orbitz instead. Sure, I could have used another browser, or another Firefox profile, or just temporarily changed my usual settings. But with Orbitz one click away, I didn’t.
After buying my tickets from Orbitz, I had a look at the Travelocity page in the DOM Inspector. Their not-so-careful web designer would like the font size of the navigation menu to be 11.7 px, whereas with my settings it’s 14 px. That made the menu wrap, and with their line-height setting and some padding, it pushed the “About Travelocity” link down over the top of the options I most needed to get at.
14 px isn’t exactly an insanely large font size. I wonder how much business they’ve lost because of their misconception that the web is a one-size-fits-all environment. Firefox is not the only browser which gives the user decent control — Konqueror, Opera, and Safari all let their users choose a minimum font size, and I’m sure these are not the only ones.
At Orbitz, I had to click through a great lot of pages to get my purchase taken care of. Every page displayed just fine.