Online booking for hotels, trains, 'planes, hire cars and holidays in general has been around for, what, a decade and a half. So it's rather disappointing to me that in many cases online forms, which should swiftly and elegantly allow me to book my chosen form of transport or port of call, appear to have been designed by half-witted data harvesters with a sideline in sadism, then coded using an advanced form of pre-broken HTML and attached to a 386-based payment processing server using a strand of copper wire that a magpie is repeatedly trying to detach to build its nest.

I had occasion over summer to use a variety of booking systems because I did a lot of travelling around the world. Plane, train, hotel, I booked the lot. The shining beacon in an otherwise turgid morass has been the UK train booking sites, which I have found fast, simple to use, effective and, for the most part, free from the need for me to hand over my inside leg measurement and mother's maiden name.

The rest... it's pathetic. Why make me hand over vast swathes of my personal information just to book a room? It's not necessary. I know it's not necessary, because when I give up after entering five pages of information, only to be greeted with "Unknown error" and the loss of all data, I phone up the organisation concerned and all they seem to require is my name, credit card number and card expiry date. Job done.

The Internet should be quicker but, offshored call-centres aside, in countless cases I've found it faster and easier to book by phone, because the online booking systems all seem to suffer from the same disease: feature creep.

I can picture the development scenario. What started off as a simple plug-in to an existing phone booking system became a multi-linked database-populating application that extracts the widest possible range of information from prospective customers in order to "better serve their requirements" (i.e. flog the data to marketing companies). Except it doesn't, because the customers get annoyed and either book by phone or go elsewhere.

These days I think of 'Feature Creep' as a person rather than a characteristic: the type of greasy idiot in the corner of every design meeting room who persuades an already-bored board that it'd be a good idea to collect 53 different items of data from anyone who wants to book a hotel in Northampton.

Anthropomorphising such idiocy in this fashion gives me a fun way to while away my time in front of forms designed by cretins, as I picture myself repeatedly slapping the Feature Creep with a wet fish whenever he opens his mouth to speak.

Tags: html hotel shelf life train travelocity bing travel george hobica american express