Off to Geneva, thanks in part to ShopQwik

So, I am sat at Stansted Airport waiting for my EasyJet flight to Geneva. Got some business there on Monday and Tuesday.

I have, for a while, been meaning to book a trip away exclusively using ShopQwik — you can book a flight or a hotel room (or both, or a hired car, come to think of it) within 60 seconds. Right from your handset. Total brilliance.

I wasn’t able to do the whole shebang (i.e. book and pay) this time because of the mechanics of the deal we’ve got in place — I had to tell Hetty what flight/hotel I wanted and the company paid it directly. Good news for my bank balance — bit of an arse though, as I wanted to try out the whole ShopQwik end-to-end experience myself.

However, I used ShopQwik for everything-but. Sat on the train into London, I opened up the delightful application on the E61. The Nokia E61 version of ShopQwik is, I think, their best yet. It takes such super advantage of the nice big screen. The flash looks brilliant and the interface works phenomenally well. Within seconds I was querying flights — not just EasyJet — but ‘everything’ from any London Airport. There was a Swiss Air from London City that someone recommended, but actually, the EasyJet flight from Stansted offered better times. When you request a flight on ShopQwik, it does the super hard work for you. It is really something to behold — you’re given a list of inbound/outbound flight times and locations and you just pick the one you want… two seconds and it’s booked.

Did the same with the hotel. In fact, I managed to find a wickedly good priced deal.

However: I want to do the whole thing by ShopQwik. In fact, this is what I’m planning —

I’m going to ask Ed to use my N90 to video me sat in Starbucks BOOKING the whole thing on ShopQwik. Now, yes you can book a flight in 60 seconds, but I reckon it’ll take me longer — by design — as I’ll want to have a nose around various options on the ShopQwik menus, decide on the actual flight I want, and so on. However I reckon it will be a brilliant example of the technology. I’ll sit there and book the flight and the hotel while he videos the experience, then I’ll publish the video for all to see. Wicked.

I think I’ll go away on a non business leisure trip somewhere in Europe at the end of the month(ish). Maybe early Dec. That’s when we’ll do it.

Oh, and I’ve checked the data rates from T-Mobile. Shocking. £7.50 a meg. Sheeeeesh. While I’m at it: I DID NOT bring my Vodafone data card. Screw that. I’m not having another ridiculous data bill.