"MYSWITZERLAND.COM" Page 1, 2

Pluses and minuses

On the plus side, Myswitzerland.com is packed with convenient features for travelers, such as:

• Basic information with hotel listings for 400 cities, towns, and resorts.

• More than 3,000 hotel pages.

• Travel deals that range from short-stay hotel packages to all-inclusive tours.

• A photo gallery that you can use to find pictures and send electronic postcards.

• "TravelTips" with basic information on currency, customs regulations, and other topics.

• An events calendar that you can search by city, event category, and range of dates.

• A "personal folder" for planning and booking a Swiss vacation online. (This is similar to the "shopping carts" on e-commerce sites.)

On the downside, Myswitzerland.com seems incomplete for such an ambitious site. Negatives include:

• Limited information on its city, town, and resort pages. While the pages offer quick overviews of Swiss destinations, they aren't nearly as complete as the sites maintained by local tourist offices.

• An emphasis on e-commerce at the expense of information. Some localities get short shrift, most likely because they haven't signed on as business partners of Switzerland Tourism. This is understandable, but it means you won't find much general information on major resorts like Grindelwald and Zermatt.

• Too few external links. Like many corporate Web sites, Myswitzerland.com has an isolationist attitude toward the Web. It links mostly to its business partners, and even the URLs of its partner hotels aren't hot links. 

• Existing "deep links" to Switzerland National Tourist Office pages no longer work. A basic rule of Web design is "Don't change your URLs without leaving a redirect page." Switzerland Tourism made the mistake of dumping its existing pages with the launch of Myswitzerland.com, causing an instant epidemic of broken links on Web sites all over the world--including Switzerland & Austria for Visitors and Europe for Visitors at About.com.

Tips for travel planning

Myswitzerland.com is a great place to shop for a travel package or browse around for introductory information. But for in-depth guides to Swiss cities, towns, and resorts, you're better off visiting the Web sites of local tourist offices. You'll find links to these on:

Swiss Cantons/Regions switzerlandforvisitors.com
This section of the Switzerland & Austria Travel Planner has 30 pages of local and regional tourism links in Switzerland, ranging from tourist offices to Cheryl Imboden's illustrated travel articles.

Related Web site

Myswitzerland.com
Select a language and your country of origin with the drop-down menus to see a customized version of Switzerland Tourism's information and e-commerce site.

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