Orbitz Flights, Hotels, Cars (for iPhone)

For booking on the go, Orbitz Flights, Hotels, Cars (for iPhone) is matched by only Travelocity (for iPhone) (Free, 2 stars) when it comes to porting the desktop travel experience to the smartphone. Unlike more targeted apps such as Expedia Hotel (for iPhone) (Free, 3.5 stars), Hipmunk Flight Search (for iPad) (Free, 3.5 stars), and Orbitz Hotels (for iPad)?(Free, 3.5 stars), Orbitz?s iPhone app lets customers to do a lot from the small screen, including, as the name suggests, booking flights, hotels, and car rentals.

While it?s a much better user experience than Travelocity?s app?which more closely resembles a mobile website?Orbitz Flights, Hotels, Cars still needs some UI tune-ups. More importantly, even though it carries over the price protection that made the Orbitz (Free, 4 stars) desktop site an Editors? Choice winner, Orbitz fails to provide a complete travel booking solution: Without the option to book flights with hotels, customers cannot benefit from the significant savings found in bundling. The result is a mixed bag, an app more complete?though less refined?than Orbitz?s iPad version and still secondary to the desktop site.

Hotel Booking
I began testing the iPhone app by comparing its hotel booking to that of the iPad. Unfortunately, there?s little basis of comparison. While its sibling takes advantage of the iPad?s mobile tech and screen estate, the iPhone version feels generic. Yes, there?s an option to locate using GPS (plus Orbitz also lets you manually input a city or address), but everything else feels like the desktop site, diminished. You specify your check-in and checkout dates, select number of guests and rooms via drop-downs, but once you get to the results screen, there are just two ways to explore hotels: Distance and Lowest Price. Forget about star ratings, amenities, or Orbitz?s own ?Best Value? hotels.

I settled on a Manhattan hotel called The Strand ($339/night). While Orbitz automatically retrieves the best value room (in this case the Superior Room), you can also tap See All Rooms to review all options (at The Strand there were five rooms scaling to the Deluxe Room, valued at $429). Under Hotel Details you can browse photos (sorry, no photo-swiping), pin the hotel to a Google Map, or peruse Orbitz user reviews, amenities, and the hotel description. I?m glad to see that Orbitz allows customers to access all of the hotel-related information from the site, though I do wish they had conceived a less text-heavy means of sharing that content. One area where Orbitz deserves praise, however, is in its app-wide integration of a login: Whether you?re booking a hotel, flight, or car rental, Orbitz allows customers to either manually enter billing information or sign into Orbitz to repurpose existing account details.

Flight Search
The Flights section follows the same basic structure of Hotels. You specify either a one-way or round-trip journey, enter destination and arrival places and dates, and choose your number of travelers. Unfortunately, the destination and arrival fields don?t use predictive text, so when I entered New York I had to select a specific airport from a second screen. On the other hand, Orbitz does allow you to add some useful options to your search, including Cabin (class), Preferred Airline (via drop-down), and a Flight Preference (a tick-box for non-stop flights).

As with Hotels, there are limited ways to sift through results. Orbitz lets customers sort by Lowest Price or Depart Time. Orbitz?s Matrix, one of the defining features of the desktop site, doesn?t make the cut (nor does the option to sort by Shortest Flight). Finally, when it comes to selecting a flight, I hope your fingers are smaller than mine: You can?t just tap a flight name; instead you must peck a tiny Select button to open results.

Car Rental
The last key section of the app is car rentals. Via drop-down you specify your pickup and drop-off airport or city, date and time, and driver?s age (21-24 or 25+). While there?s no sorting on the results page?cars automatically list by lowest price?you can filter by a car type (e.g. compact) or company (e.g. Hertz). The only snag I encountered in my testing was that the car rental section loaded quite slowly, even over Wi-Fi.?

Other Goodies
Orbitz Flights, Hotels, Cars has three sections that you probably won?t use?for good reason. A Help icon reveals a customer service contact number and some text-heavy FAQs. I personally cannot imagine reading FAQs on a 3-inch screen and Orbitz has already laced contact numbers throughout the app; add some quirky UI elements (e.g. menus within menus) and the Help section doesn?t feel terribly helpful. Orbitz does include a Flight Status icon, though honestly I would recommend downloading GateGuru (for iPhone) (Free, 4 stars) from which you may check flight statuses and do much, much more?such as scope out wait times and browse airport maps. Finally, Orbitz includes a MyTrips section, which, for all intents and purposes, is a link to its website. When you tap the icon the following alert pops up: ?Please note: We?re taking you to our full site to access your trips, while we improve our mobile MyTrips experience.?

One last feature to touch upon isn?t so much a feature of the app as it is a benefit of Orbitz?s ecosystem: price protection. Although Orbitz?s app lacks plenty of desktop functionality, you?ll still benefit from the same impressive protections that secured the site the Editors? Choice designation. With Automatic Hotel Price Assurance, Orbitz will automatically send you a check (for the difference) if another customer books the same room for less. Automatically is the key word here: You do nothing but book and Orbitz takes care of the rest. That said, if you do want to hunt, and if you find it for a lower price on another site, Orbitz?s Low Price Guarantee ensures you?ll get the difference plus a $50 discount on a future booking.

Solid Functionality, Siloed
For existing customers, Orbitz Flights, Hotels, Cars (for iPhone) is a worthwhile download. It brings to the smartphone important elements of the desktop site, including the Orbitz login for fast booking and customer protection for peace of mind. That said, the user experience won?t likely draw new customers into the fold, and, until the company offers some kind of exchange between the flight, hotel, and vacation bookings, don?t expect to find many compelling deals on the go. Try it today if you?re committed to Orbitz and you?re willing to relinquish a few flourishes for the convenience of mobile travel booking.

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