Written by PatrickJ on Sunday, September 9, 2007

Mobile Sites Done Right – Orbitz

Here’s another site that’s getting it right when it comes to mobile viewing and working with it – Orbitz.com, the online travel agency and travel information provider.

Orbitz’ mobile version – which is at mobile.orbitz.com – is well-fitted to the mobile screen, basic, fast, and easy to use. It’s also got some pretty handy information just a few taps away if you’re on the go, such as:

Flight Status
Traveller Updates
Parking Information by Airport
Security Wait Times at a selected airport
Local Weather and Traffic Information
Hotel Search (Only Top 20 US Cities right now)

Read on for more screengrabs and details …

MobHappy had a very good post on the Orbitz mobile site (which is how I discovered it), with some good thoughts on what types of travel information we’re most likely to need when we’re on the ‘old’ / conventional web, and the generally very different sort of information we need when we’re on the mobile web. For instance, we probably will not be doing our initial booking on the mobile web.

Orbitz certainly seems to have designed their mobile site to cater for the most common tasks you might have for it when you’re mobile.

Above are the Flight Status and Find Hotels main screens.

And a couple Traffic and Security Wait detail screens

And finally, a Parking information screen for the Austin-Bergstrom airport.

Sadly, for now the Orbitz mobile version seems to include only US airports and hotel information (except for one Mexican city under the hotels listing). Hopefully that will expand very soon.

It’s always great to see companies making an effort to make their mobile sites great and easy to work with, and Orbitz looks like one to bookmark on your mobile for sure. It’s at:

mobile.orbitz.com