I came across this program on the net called 'Botwars' which is a game where you write a program to instruct a robot on a rectangular battlefield so that it can survive and compete against other robots. It requires coding in a variant of BASIC devised by a developer. Now this guy probably worked alone and it was a commendable, fun application. But the debugging was so bad that I kept on stumbling across a 'subscript out of range error' till I got sick of the program when I could find no error even after debugging line by line! Well, for some time taking out the use of floats seemed to help as one or more attempts to make the code work succeeded when I tried to do all calculations using integer in the code. But, the problem error message cropped up again and I am sure it had nothing to do with array subscripts. Well, it was at least a more useful waste of time than some of my other activities!
I am new to online ticket purchasing and travel website usage[having piggybacked for purchases on parents and others so far!]. To save more time, I decided to waste more time to actually personally experience the leading travel website and aggregators! My conclusion. follows (if you disagree, you are welcome to an argument with me :), otherwise just consider this information at least as not useless)---
THE BAD
*expedia, farecast, wholesalefares miss the cheapest ticket options
*4lowfare - bad review
*hotwire- one way ticket feature not added yet - ridiculously useless for new graduates and students who don't have a relatively permanent residence and shuttle about searching jobs or changing schools
*cheapoair, travelocity- ripoff of orbitz-same search results (I am guessing it's not the other way around for cheapoair because orbitz being a bigger name may have been established first) ; mind you-Orbitz is also better than Travelocity because it shows taxes also readily
*onetravel, sidestep, ultimatefares, vayama- like aggregator site kayak.com, but not as many results. These sites are not bad as much as they are redundant.
*priceline, make my trip-no results!!! (for my particular query- maybe the server was temporarily down?- but I did get their homepage and all)
NEUTRAL (UGLY/NOT WHO KNOWS?)
*2mycountyr, ATIflights : no reviewers used them
THE GOOD
*cheaptickets- has refundable ticket options
*kayak.com- best overall with maximum results and few negatives
*bootsnall- travel site for backpackers 'Lonely Planet' style- will have cheap options and travel suggestions
The reasons other than above which influenced my choice(s) were things like ranking and no. of stars given at consumer review websites. I checked the prices for a particular international trip- not a very good statistical input, but good enough for me , a simple customer.
Let me share a secret (at least for some who read this) I found through my search work on the Internet-- Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays are typically the cheapest days to buy tickets on. Till next post, have a good life. As a parting gift is this ad by 'Subway' if you have not already seen it:
http://www.mefeedia.com/entry/subway-five-dollar-footlong-monster/7474455/
(The Japanese girl's acting looks funny to me)
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Hotels and airline tie-ups have become quite a common practice in the present times. Not only on the international level even in the domestic sectors the hotels airline tie-ups have accelerated tremendously. Due to the rise in the airfares, the whole of the aviation industry is going through a lean phase. Under these circumstances these kinds of tie-ups bring in the much-required revenue both for the airlines and the hotels. In an airline hotel tie-up more often than not 4star, 5star, or 7star hotels are involved. This trend is fast catching up in the countries like India also. Apart from the hotels in the metros like Gurgaon hotels and Navi Mumbai hotels, Bangalore hotels and Ludhiana hotels are also trying to generate the maximum profits from hotel airline tie-ups.
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