Booking a ski trip – where’s the RSS?

I have just been looking around for some last minute ski trips and I noticed something odd…. where are the RSS feeds?

RSS feeds are a great way to deliver information to users. Basically, think of it as being similar to an email subscription, except that the information is delivered in to a specialised program or webpage – for more information on RSS is the Wikipedia entry. This blog has an RSS feed (most blogs do), and you can subscribe to it by either clicking on the orange marker, or the link at the bottom of the page.

Anyway, the thing that has surprised me is how few of the ski/travel sites have RSS feeds. I visited some 10 or so well known ski company web sites in the UK and only found two with RSS feeds, namely Crystal Ski Holidays and Thomson. Of the remainder (I remember visiting Expedia, Last Minute, Thomas Cook, Ski Horizon, and Neilson) Last Minute claimed to have extensive RSS feeds available on their pages, but I couldn’t find a suitable link (the only link was to a page saying they had the facility). Most of the sites had ‘newsletters’, but no feeds.

This is all rather odd. I would have thought the ski companies would have embraced RSS feeds as a great way to deliver ‘hot deals’ to potential costumers, obviously not… I hope this will change.

If you are from a ski company and you are reading this and would like to explore the use of RSS feeds please contact MMISoftware as I am sure they would like to help!