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Since I was going to be away all of next week at various locations on business, my wife noted that my last stop was rather attractive and decided she was going to fly over to join me so we could have a mini holiday.

So I visited a varity of online travel websites to purchase a package (2-way plane fare plus hotel). Here is what I discovered.

1. www.asiatravelmart.com – not much meat, no plane tickets + hotel.
2. www.airasia.com – expensiver but lots of packages. You also have full control over your flight schedule which is sweet.
3. www.zuji.com – Expensiverest. In fact no real bargains for packages. And you don’t get to choose your flight times.
4. www.p2ptravel – plenty of bargains with actual packages.
5. www.wotif.com – This website sponsored my hotel stay at Krabi so I would have loved to use them again. Plenty of hotel bargains galore, but no plane tickets.

To make a long story short, I choose P2Ptravel.com because they were the cheapest and proceeded to book a 4 day/3night holiday package online. First P2ptravel.com forced me to create an account before it would allow me to book anything. After I chose a package, all the screen displayed was a message saying that somebody would contact me soon.

How strange?? They didn’t want my credit card details nor did they want to confirm my flight details or hotel booking?

That was 3 days ago. Nobody has called me from P2ptravel. I called them and the lady on the phone mumbled somethign about “thai ah-lions fuhrl alredi, nebbermine we wiill korl yoo soong”.

I’m still waiting.

This morning, I booked a holiday package from Airasia’s website.

To all the people who make sure everything goes smoothly when I travel on business – I have suddenly developed a deep and awesome respect for what you do.