3.1 Everyday transactions
Many transactions can now be done online – for example, ordering your shopping or booking your travel, applying for a university place or scholarship. Being able to manage digital information will help you to find what you need quickly and locate it again easily. This is really helpful when you’re carrying out such everyday tasks.
In Activity 2 you will use the knowledge and skills you have learnt in previous sessions to practise finding information, comparing prices and keeping track of what you have found out. 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 2 Finding a hotel at Ngapali Beach
You are planning a holiday at the beach and want to find a reasonably priced hotel in Ngapali. 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 Ngapali. (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, availability, distance from Ngapali city centre or by ranking. This is called ‘filtering’ so that you get fewer results, which are more suited to what you are looking for.
You may have gone through something like the following process:
- From the front screen of the site select ‘Hotels’ and type ‘Ngapali’ 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.
3 Digital skills for everyday life