Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

extra helpful

I got a weird e-mail from Expedia this evening:

Alyson, let us help you with your trip.

We noticed you were looking for airfares to Tucson and thought we’d share some travel ideas with you. Planning the rest of your trip is just a few clicks away.

You can go right to Expedia.com to find hotels, cars, activities, and packages. Or, search for another flight.

The e-mail contained a search form pre-filled with the dates I’d been searching for, along with a listing of hotel offers for those same dates.

I get that they’re trying to be helpful and use these personalized appeals to get people to use their service. But while I’m aware that my movements on any Web site are bound to be tracked in some manner or another, it’s a little unsettling to have my surfing activities reflected right back at me, unsolicited. Amazon’s “The Page You Made,” featuring products related to the ones I’ve clicked on in that session, is one thing. An e-mail related to my site activities sent days after the fact feels more creepy than anything else.

On a related note, I ended up using Yahoo’s Farechase aggregator to find my flight home for Christmas. Using a fairly simple interface, users can enter their travel information and the site will search several travel and individual airline sites for flight and price information. Then there’s a nifty AJAX interface to filter those results. When the user actually selects a flight, the site shunts them off to the fare’s site of origin (in my case, an airline Web site) to make the purchase. Not bad.