Friday, July 17, 2009

Disappointment

Sometimes you think you've just seen something amazing: on news, a discount or some great technology, since this blog has a certain orientation, I'll focus on the later.

This week I was planning my oncoming trip to Slovenia, and me and the Doc got to the point of looking at transportation, specifically trains.
Google led us to this site. If you enter the site you'll notice it adapts to your localization settings - nice! We've started typing "Venice" in the destination and not only we had auto completion we saw support for different writing options for "Venice" - really nice comparing to the dozens of other transportation sites we've seen (at some point we thought it could read Hebrew but that's really an exaggerated expectation). And now to the most amazing feature (tam tam tam...) the prices appear in local (ILS) coin! After being amazed for a couple of seconds (yes I know, it's not really that a sophisticated technology, but as mentioned above we did see other transportation sites), we've decided to check what the British version looks like.
Apparently the two sites give different prices for the exact same trip. Yeah, that's right, three adults traveling from Ljubljana to Venice buying tickets in Israel will pay 453 ILS and the same three adults will pay only 42 pounds traveling from Great Britain. European discount? Don't think so, since Australians pay less. I've tried long and hard to think what could be the code behind those ridiculous results, but I still have no idea, suggestions?

So, going back to the first paragraph the conclusion is that miracles do not exist, sorry kids.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Actually the URL for the first site was an Israeli one (http://www.raileurope.co.il/), which is rather surprising for a European transportation site, and added to the WOW factor.