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Patrick: I’ve completely had it with you.
Online vacation booking cartel: But why, we love it when you visit our sites and endlessly scope around.
Patrick: Yeah well thanks, but you see, you travel sites are all structured the same way: “Give us your dates of travel, your destination and we’ll display a bunch of options.”
Online vacation booking cartel: Yeah, so.
Patrick: Let me finish. That system may be convenient for you, but what about from the customer’s perspective? For instance, let’s say that I want to go away to somewhere sunny to lie on a beach for two weeks, as a kind of reward, perhaps for achieving some personal or professional goal, say for example, becoming a registered architect. And because I’m single and will be travelling alone and because work is a little flexible at the moment, the exact date of departure is really not pinned down. And in fact, the duration of travel is not pinned down either. And actually I’m not particularly attached to any destination either. I’m flexible. Totally flexible. You however are not. I just want a decent deal to exploit my flexibility, but in order to get options from you, I have to first give you a date. there’s no other way.
Online vacation booking cartel: Yeah, so.
Patrick: Yeah ok, so let’s say that I’m not swept off my feet with the options you give me after my first search, and I want to look for more options. What do I do? Go back to the search screen and change one of the variables, say like “return date” and roll the dice and sit around waiting for your results.
Online vacation booking cartel: Exactly.
Patrick: So then I should just take days of my life to troll your site until I find something suitable.
Online vacation booking cartel: You already have.
Patrick: Your system sucks. It’s designed to just wear me down until I just pick a vacation, any vacation.
Online vacation booking cartel: Pretty much.
Patrick: But you have all this info in a massive database, right, with all these vacation packages whose prices have been assigned, let’s face it, completely arbitrarily.
Online vacation booking cartel: Ha-ha, I know.
Patrick: Well if I narrow the search to 14 day vacations in sunny beach locations, for under $2500, you should be able to display the search results.
Online vacation booking cartel: Ideally.
Patrick: Well why don’t you do that?
Online vacation booking cartel: That’s not how it works; too transparent, too orderly. And it would detract from the excitement of the randomness factor.  So, just tell us what day you want to fly and we’ll set you up.
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Patrick: No.
Online vacation booking cartel: Come on, make a commitment.
Patrick: Well, someday in April.
Online vacation booking cartel: Vague. Come on, man, tell me the date you’d like to depart.
Patrick: I don’t know yet! It depends on what kind of deal you can give me.
Online vacation booking cartel: Oh. You want a deal.
Patrick: If I can get one, yeah.
Online vacation booking cartel: Ok, no problem, I’ll check. What day do you want to depart?
Patrick: I’m going to kill you.
Online vacation booking cartel: Ha. Yeah, I know. You love this don’t you?
Patrick: I can’t figure out if you’re that smart and this is all intentional in order to keep the business opaque, or that you’re that dumb and that you’re just out of touch with how your customer shops.
Online vacation booking cartel: It doesn’t really matter though, because the result is the same. Right? So.
Patrick: Unbelievable. Why can’t you just lay out all the options?
Online vacation booking cartel: For one thing, there would be hundreds of results.
Patrick: Yeah, but you could display them in order of price or by location or number of hotel stars or whichever criterion is most important to me. And after about only 15 or 20 results I’d have enough information to quickly make a choice.
Online vacation booking cartel: I really don’t see it happening.
Patrick: Look, how about this: I tell you I want to go somewhere sunny for two weeks in April. And I want a deal. And you throw out some options. How about that?
Online vacation booking cartel: Alright, let me check. What day would you like to depart?
Patrick: {nothing}
Online vacation booking cartel: Problem?
Patrick: All I want is for you to offer up some deals on a sunny vacation for any two week period in April.
Online vacation booking cartel: Great. We can help. When are you leaving?
Patrick: It doesn’t matter. You tell me. I’ll leave on the day that gives me a decent deal. Why should I pick a date if I don’t know if it’s better to fly on a Saturday or a Thursday or whatever. So if I pick the wrong date, all the options you give me would suck.
Online vacation booking cartel: True. Dude, I’d like to help you, but I need a date to get the party started.
Patrick: Fine. You know when I want to leave? I want to leave, fuck I don’t know, Saturday April 4th.
Online vacation booking cartel: Cool. Now do you want a morning, afternoon or evening flight?
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