Two Web sites were accessed for comparative purposes: www.orbitz.com and www.travelocity.com. Both Web sites target travelers from the leisure/vacation market segment and the business travel sector. Orbitz appears to be more directly focused on the vacationer than Travelocity. Both sites download rapidly and both provide rich text home pages that allow the visitor to register, sign in, and access a number of special ôdealsö or to search for car rentals, flights, hotels, cruises, and vacations.
Of the two sites, www.orbitz.com makes more effective use of graphics, visual arts, and a multifaceted layout. Both sites offer a box allowing visitors to program a vacation/travel choice and to search for best price travel deals. Similarly, both sites use tabs at the top of their home page to allow visitors to shop or browse by category. Both sites also highlight ôsuper salesö and ôlast minute dealsö with underlined or bulleted statements.
Each of these sites offer multiple point and click navigation options but the www.orbitz.com site is organized in a more logical manner and is easier to navigate than the www.travelocity.com site. Both of these sites make good use of blue borders to highlight text and www.travelocity.com also provides a periodically changing banner ad for a seasonal vacation spot.
Both sites attempt to offer browsers multiple options for interesting or exciting/appealing vacations, highlighting such tourism hot spots as Hawaii, Florida, Mexico and the Caribbean, and Las Vegas. The content appears to be reliable on both sites, but neither site can truly be characterized as entertaining. These are user-friendly, easy to navigate, informative sites focused on providing up-to-date travel information and selling/booking travel options. Both sites are easy to find on search engines like Google. By signing in or registering, visitors have the option of receiving e-mails advertising special
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