A Time of Magic

I just received a demand for payment of the car insurance premium for this year. Nothing unusual in that usually, but the car was in an accident in May and the inspector appointed by the insurance company announced that it was a write-off a few weeks later.

So how come the renewal notice? That’s because I told the claims department about the accident but didn’t tell the “administration”. Funnily enough, on the renewal notice it actually refers to the accident though.

It would seem that their systems are at least partially linked up, despite what I was told by the broker, but not linked up in an intelligent enough way to stop renewal notices going out for cars that they themselves have written off some months ago.

There’s really no excuse for this. Cars are written off all the time so surely someone must have realised that a written off car doesn’t require insurance?

Whilst it’s fairly easy to find a hotel online these days, the development of the corresponding sites for self-catering apartments and villas seems to lag well behind for no good reason.

Granted the majority of self-catering places are let directly by the owner but many small hotels are also run by the owner and his/her family so there’s no real reason why this shouldn’t also be possible for the villas and apartments. Yes, you do get them on some hotel sites but in very limited numbers compared to the number that are clearly available when you walk around some of the resorts.

Surely it must be just as profitable to run a comparable online reservation site for the owners of self-catering places as it is for hotels and the like? The technology certainly seems to be in place and all that’s really necessary to implement it on some of the hotel sites is to add additional room types (which they can do at the level of individual hotels already).

What’s probably the problem is not so much the technology in this instance but the confidence of the owners to allow automated reservations for their properties with none of the pre-arrival contact with the renters that they get at the moment.

Although the search facilities of some “find me a flight” websites have moved a long way (notably SkyScanner) in recent years, many are quite simply dreadful with next to no facilities to let you specify flexibility on either time or date never mind location.

Flexibility in location? Sure, why not? With the arrival of discount airlines many people work their way around the world by going to a different place each holiday and, usually, aren’t too bothered where that somewhere is in any given year. For instance, right now, I’m trying to sort out a Christmas trip for us and the sole criteria is ”somewhere Christmasy” which covers quite a lot of northern Europe.

Some do allow flexibility in dates it’s true but it’s rare and there are only a few sites like SkyScanner which let you look at the profile of prices over a month. However, as we’re finding out that still isn’t enough. What’s causing me the most difficulty right now is that I don’t want to have to leave the house before dawn to get the the aiport which means that I don’t really want a flight in the morning. SkyScanner is nearly there but won’t let me scan for flights departing between noon and 5pm and it’s quite an effort to go through all the possible destinations manually.

What I’d like to be able to say is ”I’d like to go to somewhere between around the 20th and come back around the 29th with the flights departing between around noon and around 5pm”. Oh, and whilst I’m in wish-list mode, I’d also like to be able to add the ability to depart not from a specific airport but from any airport within, say, 2 hours of home and perhaps to come back to a different one for that matter (OK, not too many people do that, but some of us do).