Book it on your mobile, man!

Link: BBC NEWS | Technology | Web underused in time of crisis.

Bill Thompson, the BBC’s technology commentator, could really have used ShopQwik to great advantage last week. Have a look at the palaver he encountereed…

The few attempts I made to call reservation centres at BA and Ryanair were as futile as I knew they would be, but I managed to get myself booked on the morning flight to Milan – since cancelled, as you might expect, but rebooked for the evening – within five minutes of being told there were spaces on it.

Of course it was far from perfect. There’s no way to book a flight for the same day, and Ryanair didn’t bother to send me an e-mail overnight to tell me that my early morning flight had been cancelled, even though they insisted I provided an address.

And none of the airlines has anything as useful as an RSS feed for flight updates that I could subscribe to.

But without the web it would simply have been impossible.