3.1 Everyday transactions
Many transactions can now be done online, for example, ordering your shopping or booking your travel. Being able to manage digital information will help you to find what you need quickly, and locate it again easily. This is a big help when carrying out such everyday tasks.
In the following activity you will practise finding information, comparing prices and keeping track of what you have found out. This is laying the foundation for future weeks of the course. The purpose of the activity is to find out how confident you are in doing this kind of online task, rather than to learn how to use a particular website in detail.
Activity 3 Finding a hotel in Majorca
You are planning a holiday in the sun and want to find a reasonably priced hotel in Majorca. For the purposes of this activity you are going to use TripAdvisor.
TripAdvisor claims to be ‘the world’s largest travel site’. It offers advice and reviews from millions of real people on accommodation and places of interest. These reviews provide a useful way of checking if somewhere really lives up to the image presented by the owners. It enables you to find details of holiday accommodation and compare prices quickly.
- Open up a new tab in your browser (usually you can do this at the top of the page, next to this tab).
- Go to a search engine, such as Google, and type ‘TripAdvisor’.
- Select the site from the results, http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk
Have a go at finding details of hotels in Majorca. (If you have difficulty using TripAdvisor you will find some advice on how to search in the Feedback).
It is possible to register with TripAdvisor and save hotels you like the look of to your personal area within the site. However, for the purposes of this activity, save the page for the hotel to your browser favourites. Set up a new folder and give it a name, e.g. ‘holidays’.
Discussion
How did you get on? Did you find what you were looking for?
It is likely that you found a large number of hotels at a range of prices. There are different ways you can cut down the list, for example, by price, by availability, by distance from Majorca city centre or by ranking.
You may have gone through something like the following process:
- From the front screen of the site select ‘Hotels’ and type ‘Majorca’ into the box.
- Enter in the dates you would like your holiday to begin and end and select ‘Find hotels’.
- From the range of options across the top of the page, sort by ‘Price (low to high)’.
- Scan down the page to compare prices.
- Select one of the hotels (ideally with a rating of 4 or more) and view all the available deals. There is no need to go further than this unless you actually want to book a holiday.
In the next section you will explore use of social media.