I really don't get how people do research work (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip) without a computer. I really cannot stand seeing websites in a small screen without the ability to quickly open 4 browser windows with 4 tabs each for different combinations of dates, for example.
I have literally watched my in-laws plan and book a vacation from their smartphones. From their house, where they also have computers.
They're quite different from my side of the family, but the biggest thing is that they've never been big planners. Everything is by the seat of their pants. If you're like that, you're probably OK with taking one of the first three SEO-optimized search results and making it work.
Meanwhile, I'm not booking anything until I have a proposed itinerary.
How often do you get a meaningfully better result than google.com/flights? Outside of booking with points, it's all basically the same thing and I can book on google on my phone in under a minute
I could go into detail how being able to have a dozen tabs open almost always gives a better result than simply picking the first flight on google flights. But let's assume there's no difference:
Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes?
If you have the choice to use a real computer for this, then why not? It's not like booking a big trip is something you do while sitting on a bus.
Then of course there's accommodation, itineraries, visas, trip research...
I’m wondering what the sample size is for this assessment. I know gen z people that don’t buy stuff on Amazon out of anxiety, let alone booking a 4 figure flight.
just for the record, I completely agree that _research_ is way easier on a computer.
But i take issue with this concern:
> Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes?
My iphone (safari) auto-fills almost all of those details. It’s also likely that semi-frequent travelers have an account with the airline in question, so passport and TSA precheck info is pre-saved too.
My personal experience is that Chrome on my PC is more reliable/predictable than Safari on my iPad.
Now I am wondering if this is Safari/Chrome thing and not a mobile/desktop thing.
Certainly if the autofill doesn't work and I do need to to type it in, the PC is way easier. I'm thinking international travel for 5 people - all my responsibility and I don't want to get held up half way across the world when no one has slept for a day, work visas beign contingent on correctness, etc.
Indeed. I often complete purchases via mobile because the experience is better. For example, using Apple Pay. The ability to have details auto-fill works on desktop, but it works far better on mobile I find.
The idea of manually typing any of this stuff in is very old fashioned.
I bought a Tesla in 2018 on my phone, only ever having seen one, and without ever having driven one. In a quiet/stalled moment while traveling.
But that says 1000% more about impulsivity coming to my rescue, with reckless disregard for the risk of regret at the first sign of boredom, than any trust in mobile interfaces.
I didn't (and would never) book the trip that cost a fraction of that on a phone or pad.
> Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes?
Not only do they type it in, they let them save their information...
For tasks like planning travel I often am trying to optimize multiple goals at once. I might find cheaper flights on certain days but more expensive hotels. This is much easier on larger screens because you can view more information side by side.
I live in a place where I have to fly to a nearby bigger airport to go anywhere outside my province. In other words, everything is a compromise on routing, layovers and cost. When I lived in a big city, it was just timing and cost that mattered.
Frequently it isn't that google flights on a phone doesn't find the same flight, its that it is much easier to figure out the tradeoffs with more screen real estate. E.g. I can see that a flight is cheaper, but it involves mixing airlines, and a terminal change that I probably can't trust on a tight schedule in winter.
Not kidding, pricing is based on these bullshit assumptions more than you might think. For the German market, for example, it's also cheaper to buy tickets on Thursday evening around 22:00-23:30. Paid around 400$ less for a 2k trip, multiple times, reproducibly, not depending on seasons or years.
Even that presumes you already know when you’ll want to leave and come back. For me, I’ve got a vague idea, but it’ll depend on how much time I want to spend there. And that’ll be based on what I want to do, which may only be available certain days of the week or times of day. And that’s before factoring in the prices of those things relative to their availability and how much I want to do them.
To figure all this out, I’m going to need to keep notes across several browser tabs, likely while communicating asynchronously with whoever else is going on the trip. All of this is dramatically easier with an actual computer.
Dude, you've got to check every possible combination of departure and arrival dates from each different nearby airport then check everything again as one ways using different carriers then compare paying cash to using points then compare Airbnb to hotels then recheck the flights to make sure that paying slightly more for different dates or routes wouldn't be offset by saving more on the hotel... then you can book. Takes about 50 tabs.
This. its enough to check a couple of alternatives, the prices are nearly the same most of the time. If you can move dates for your travel, that is far more impactful, like if you have the option to avoid major holidays or such. Note that I am not in the US, and I do agree that it is much better to do research on my desktop!
It's not that you get a meaningfully better result. It is that you can open an arbitrary number of results and trivially compare them side by side. Essentially multitasking multiple concurrent searches and scenarios. Smartphones limit you to one view at a time on the screen and make it somewhat clumsy to flip through tabs in comparison.
Yes the results are pretty much all there on Google Flights
But if you want to shuffle times/dates/different choices of flights to find the "best one" (which does not mean the cheapest one with weird connections)
That's the thing for us whose life is mostly "by the seat of their pants", there really isn't. You book the tickets, you go there, see what you feel like doing, do those things, and go home. Done that for all my travels more or less, never felt like I missed anything and had a blast most of the times.
I still do everything important on a computer and wouldn't book the flight on a smartphone, but that probably says more about my age than anything else.
I mostly use a computer because you can get a better idea what is a good deal, and fits in my budget.
If I had stacks of cash, I could easily see myself booking everything via my phone.
But I'm too much of a penny pincher..
But I do often only pre-book the first night/s accom, then book the rest as I travel and know where I will be when. But I do travel with my laptop, and often will park up somewhere and hotspot it, to find that days accom. (+ I get cash back deals on computer)
I don't over plan trips, but I still want to make sure I'm not overpaying. There's all kinds of combinations of things to check. Also thinking through routes through areas. Fly in, take a train around. Things like that. Also getting hotels or vacation rentals and go through the reviews and seeing which neighborhoods you want to stay in
> There's all kinds of combinations of things to check. Also thinking through routes through areas. Fly in, take a train around.
For me, not knowing those things and figuring them out on the spot is part of why I love vacations, and going through review of neighborhoods or figuring out the exact place where to stay would remove a lot of the fun.
I admire your style, and envy it, at least a little.
But I couldn’t do it, especially with the presence of which I’ll call “expectations of planning” in my immediate circle. Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.
No level of planning can match the raw joy of spontaneously enjoying something with like minded friends.
> Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.
The majority of such people perform what I call “checkbox vacationing”. It’s not about actually enjoying any particular thing, it’s just about checking the boxes of whatever some online list says is the current “best XYZ”.
> especially with the presence of which I’ll call “expectations of planning” in my immediate circle
Yeah, when traveling with others who do like/need to plan I'll go with their plans and flow unless it gets too boring. When traveling with my wife I'll even stick around even if I'm bored.
> Some people want the best possible experience
I mean, I do too! :) Just different methods of getting there.
> can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research
Man, just daily life must be tough if they're feeling FOMO from such low stakes situations, I couldn't handle that myself :/
You missed plenty, and you wouldn't even know it because you didn't even do the most basic research about where you were going. It's a very lazy way to travel, and I guarantee I got way more out of my travel than you did if we visited the same places. But I don't know you, maybe your idea of a good time is getting drunk in whatever corner bar there is nearby.
If I'm spending thousands on plane tickets and hotels, and taking time off from work, and I know I'll likely never visit a place again (because there are so many other places to visit), I can't understand not doing some basic research on the things that the area is famous for, to visit those things. But whatever, you do you.
> It's a very lazy way to travel, and I guarantee I got way more out of my travel than you did if we visited the same places
It's funny, I'd say the same to you! :)
How often do you sleep over on the couch or floor of strangers homes, waking up when they wake up, participating in something that isn't overflowing with tourists already? Or got to experience how a day is for someone who works and lives in the place you're visiting for the first time?
Granted, it's not for everybody, but we both feel the same about each other, which hopefully means we at least enjoy our own lives, even if we wouldn't like each others. But I won't say you're lazy just because you don't try to truly experience other cultures when you travel, we just have different ways of traveling and enjoying life. And that's OK, as long as you enjoy what you do, and I enjoy what I do :)
>How often do you sleep over on the couch or floor of strangers homes, waking up when they wake up, participating in something that isn't overflowing with tourists already? Or got to experience how a day is for someone who works and lives in the place you're visiting for the first time?
You have the strangest travel goals I've ever heard of.
Fortunately I don't have to sleep on floors when I travel. That sounds awful.
I can't imagine anyone would want to "experience how a day is for someone who works and lives" in my life, they'd be sitting on a couch in my office watching me type in lines of code all day. Thrilling.
I spent 3 months living and working in a city abroad (again, coding), so yeah, I know what it's like. We travelled all around the region, saw and did amazing things instead of "winging it", and the horror - there were tourists there too! Avoiding tourists just to avoid tourists means you missed out on things that are interesting, because why, you don't like being around other people? But I don't actually care why or how you travel, you do you.
There's a book out there (I don't remember the author, title, or anything really) written by a guy who traveled around the world, over several years, in a VW bus(?). The thing that struck me is, he got home within a couple days of when he planned to, before he even took off. The entire trip was planned.
I find it so charming that people from the first world just assume that unplanned trips are the norm, and coming back as per expectation is can sometimes be surprising (even if it's a very long trip).
Do take a look at what people from developing countries go through - sometimes you cannot even get a visa without all your lodging booked and a confirmed return flight ticket.
Or you are accepted to go to a conference in the USA to present your research and the USA conveniently grants your visa for you one week after the conference occurs.
Speaking from a developing country with a large population of less educated people, I think you would be surprised to find out that a majority of the people in the world simply don't do "research work". Successfully booking a flight ticket from a straightforward app on their phone is already at their limit (BTW, ~80% of people in the world have never taken a plane). For most other "research" requirement like planning a trip, they would just search on tiktok to see what those influencers have to say (or nowadays, ask the AI)
I'm with you, but I guess users don't care (and I really don't get it).
None of the mobile finance apps I've used even have half the reporting ability I want (presumably because users don't care, and not because it wouldn't fit on the screen).
finance apps will soon automate that kind of things, and most probably the phone app will have it before the web version
there's resource rot it seems, desktop/web have less than the phone, and it shows
hp printer/scanner app is way leaner than anything they've ever released on windows (not saying much but still), same for my bank app it's a bit faster, and better designed (features and ui)
People use computers, just not Macs. Which is a shame because it feels like where Apple has the largest advantage compared to their competitors, being that high end Android phones are rather nice and the barrier to making a good tablet is quite low but a laptop is a whole different ball game, and Apple is far ahead of the rest.
I bought my dad a Mac laptop when I got my first job out of college and he used it for well over a decade. I even later got him a MacBook Air and he kept using the old one for years yet out of habit… I imagine that’s not an uncommon pattern for non-programmers who aren’t gamers.
I still use my thinkpad from 2012. It runs fine with Linux on it, i had to replace the hdd and some other parts but otherwise it’s holding up.
Granted I only do very simple stuff on it, no dev work, video or gaming.
Mostly browser, reading, writing, music and chatting
Is this because they don't have macs or because they spent more on the other stuff? My M1 macBook is 4+ years old and still going strong. How many phones do average people buy in that same time?
You don't need a lot of space to see everything, because you can store information in your memory.
You narrow down your options by having knowledge like "I have points on these airlines so I want to fly on Star Alliance which has partners that fly out of (quick check) these airports, so let's plan the itinerary in this way..."
I just got back from traveling the last 3 months (40 flights, 6 continents) and planned all of it from my phone. From flights, to hotels, to visas.
And it's simply better than a laptop. 4 tabs in 4 browsers means you're distracted, you're not pruning useless information, you don't know what you don't know.
I do 95% of my work on my phone too, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
I get the feeling that people don't do research work. They buy whatever is affordable that gets advertised to them first. They can't even tell the difference between ads and search results. Their devices are primarily for media consumption and they create little if anything. They have zero need for most of the computing power their devices offer, could get by just fine on a phone from 10 years ago if it were still being supported, and they really only want the latest models for social status reasons.
With paper being an storage medium they occasionally saved to :)
> (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip)
Heck I was doing EXACTLY that on an iPhone while loafing at a friend's just now, because I wanted to make the most of my time and I don't want to carry my laptop/iPad anywhere.
Lightweight XR glasses would be the best of both worlds.
That's an exceptionally high bar of talent and creativity. For the 99.999+% of us, the computer and the mobile has made completion of many tasks highly efficient. Like surfing HN on a lazy Saturday morning...
I'm not going to list specific apps since I don't want to be a shill, but in the last few years the web has become increasingly hostile with ads, fake reviews, bad information (Especially sites like Reddit.com). A lot of places that used to have good information have since been astroturfed. And Search Engines like Google will happily serve them up on the front page of any relevant web search.
"I don't get why the kids these days book their travel using an app" is this generation's "I don't understand why people don't use travel agents". There are better sources of information and that information has moved to walled-garden mobile apps.
Whenever I travel I'm also coordinating with at least 2 other people. That may include my wife/extended family, or friends. I may jump on my desktop for research, but ultimately I'm sending a browser tab to my phone to share via txt with others.
My wife and I travel a lot, we aren’t that price sensitive. We are going to fly Delta where we both have status and stay in a Hyatt or Hilton brand hotel where I have status. It takes us less than 10 minutes to make travel plans on our phones.
Very few people do any research work. They usually click whatever platform they are already in (ie: mytrip.xxx) and just book the ticket there and probably pay using Apple Pay straight from their phone.
People do research work without a mac. A Windows box or Chromebook to do the stuff you want is less than half the cost of an Air, and a MBP is priced out of everything but status-conscious executive (and para-executive) consumers and FAANG-adjacent tech folks.
I hate submitting any kind of form on any website from my phone, because I can't open dev tools and see if there were any errors in the response which were invisible in the UI.
