Magazine Issue: November, 2011
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This month Faisal Memon, CEO, Illusions Online reviews the
UAE's newest Arabic and English online leisure travel resource
User Interface & Navigation:
Joob.com is fast and easy to navigate. The dual-language English and
Arabic options cater well to the targeted audience. The website has a
clean user interface with a good number of filtering and sorting options.
On the down side it is not optimised for the mobile platform.
Bringing it up on my Samsung Galaxy SII smartphone didn't present a
mobile-optimised site, which isn't really very user-friendly.
Search Functions:
It is excellent to see LCC options such as Air Arabia and Jazeera offered alongside scheduled carriers. You can filter your search on budget,
number of stops, airlines and timings. It also allows you to sort
based on price, duration, as well as the departure time from the origin
airport which pretty much covers the requirement of an average user.
What the website lacks is the ability to view results by flight schedules
and to easily choose the flight for outbound and inbound trips separately.
So when I was searching for direct flights to London for my trip
to World Travel Market, I was presented with 93 flight options with
over 10 pages to wade through!
Content:
Apart from flights, hotels and travel insurance, there is no option to add transfers, tours or packages to your booking. The number of hotels offered for popular destinations is also minimal compared to websites
such as Agoda and Booking.com. A search for Fujairah yielded
just three hotel options compared to 19 on Booking.com. Flight price
comparison stood up well for local carriers but a flight search to Singapore
1 Dec – 9 Dec for two adults, one child and one infant on SingaporeAir.
com brought up a fare of AED 5,630 while Joob.com offered
up a fare of AED 8,929.00 — a price diff erence of over 50%*.
Online Booking:
The booking engine is simple and straight-forward. The site accepts
credit and debit cards and has implemented powerful fraud-detection
systems to reduce fraudulent transactions. Joob.com seems to be applying
a 3.1% transaction fee (as payment charges) when booking
flights but not for every airline it seems. This charge is not mentioned
when booking hotels.
SEO:
A search on google.ae for "hotels in Singapore or Australia or
London" failed to bring up Joob.com at all.
Summary:
Joob.com is the newest OTA on the block in the region and stands
up well for simple bookings. It is a user-friendly site with good search
functions but has a long way to go in terms of content, competitive
prices and handling complex itineraries. I would say Joob.com has a
lot of work to do before it can really start to compete with airline websites
and popular OTAs that today's modern consumer is used to. The
website features a Beta Tag at the top indicating it's still in the testing
phase. So I hope Joob.com can address some of these issues in its fi nal
production version and prove to be a formidable player in the OTA
space for the Middle East region.
*Prices correct at time of going to press.
Source: http://www.hoteliermiddleeast.com
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Arabian Travel News - Web Technology Review by Faisal Memon - joob.com
