It's been a weekend of spending money. I bought a rug and coffee table (finally), an airline ticket to San Francisco, and I'm about to rent a car for this weekend's Newport Folk Festival. And I don't even have enough in my account to cover this month's rent. D-oh!

I have to complain for a minute about the travel websites online. In a way they've made our lives easier by giving us the ability to do our own price research. Yet they've burdened us with slow searches and slow search results. Travelocity is the only one of the majors that actually lets you find the best price and then pick a day. You get a little calendar will all the days offering that fare. As you click though, the days you want suddenly become "unavailable". I don't know if they do this to make you think that tickets are going fast and you need to hurry up or if it's just a flaw in the system, but it's extremely frustrating. Furthermore, the price you start out with is never the price you get by the time they actually want your credit card information. This means you have to repeat several steps to actually compare deals.

Rental cars are much much worse. You have to pick the type of car and location before ever seeing a price. It might be worth it to me to go to the airport to get the car if it would be cheaper, but I'll never know the price difference unless I go through the entire reservation process again, staring at the screen while each page loads.

There has got to be a better way to do this. Online travel reservations is one of the few lucrative industries on the internet. These companies make plenty of money. They've become giants in a few short years. All of their technology can be centralized. They aren't trying to coordinate with various resellers or franchisers, so they can have one technology team to develop the interface. Why then, can't they do a better job?