Teletextholidays

Review by Adrian Mann, owner of Adrian Mann Design, providing independent reviews and analysis of travel web sites in the UK.

There’s more to Teletext than the blocky information pages you can get via your TV. The Teletext web site has a wide range of news, weather, finance, sport and entertainment pages, but it’s probably for the cheap, last minute holidays advertised on the TV pages that Teletext is best known. The travel section – Teletextholidays.co.uk – expands this offering into a full-feature travel website.

Overall
Teletext conduct extensive research into how people use the site, and this has been used to inform the design of the site. All the functions you want are presented prominently on the home page, including a holiday search facility, flights and cruise offers, UK and Ireland breaks, and links to additional information.
The sections are colour coded, so you can tell immediately where you are, and a site map is always available, as are shortcuts to the most popular pages.

Content
The most obvious reason for using Teletext is to look for a cheap sun-and-sand holiday. The starting point is the search facility on the home page, and this requires the minimum information to return useful results. The results are displayed as a list, with 25 holidays per page, showing the destination, operator, departure date and duration, and price. Click on ‘Go’ to get more details, and a page displays more on the selected holiday, with links to the operators web site if available, email address, telephone number. There’s also a more detailed search, where you can specify such criteria as board type, price range or operator. Other searches can be conducted for flights, cruises, UK breaks – all function in much the same manner.
Aside from the more functional aspects, there’s plenty of information available on the site. Destination guides are provided by Lonely Planet, but can be brief. There’s also an option to submit your own reviews and comments. Maps are also provided, which can be saved in Adobe’s PDF format.
There’s also weather forecasts and climate information, car hire, currency, insurance – all the usual subjects we’ve come to expect, but there’s a couple of features which are more unusual. For instance, there is a clipboard, where you can save odd bits of information that may be useful or interesting as you go through the site, but you’ll need to register first to make use of this. Once this is done, you can view the stored items via cable TV or WAP phone, and have alerts sent to your mobile by text message. And if you miss watching Teletext pages on your TV, you can also get them on the website, which makes you realise just how basic and primitive they are! However, they can be printed from the web site – a facility which you don’t get on TV – and it’s quicker too.
The ‘Travel Handbook’ section has some good advice, covering subjects such as preparing for your trip, health, personal safety, food hygiene, getting around, and also links to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for up to date travel advisory information.
‘Attraction Tickets’ allows the user to order and buy tickets and passes for theme parks and attractions around the world, and covers all the best-known destinations, such as Disney World, Sea World, Universal Studios and many more, at up to 10% the usual price.

Summary
There’s more to this site than you might suspect, especially coming from Teletext, where the experience of most users of their services is pages of non-interactive information. The research they’ve conducted on usage habits has been put to good use, as the site is accessible and easy to get around. Little features really help here, like the site map, help on how to use the site and colour coded sections.
The quality of information is good, and the layout and design are simple but attractive. There were some problems with slow pages, mainly due to the banner ads, and the brochure page wouldn’t load at all. There were also a few missing images, a couple of pop-ups, and occasional problems with drop-down menus, but these are minor and don’t detract too much from the overall experience.