Two things:

(1) Earlier today I booked domestic airfare for our trip to India.

(2) 2005 marks the 10th year that I’ve used the web for commerce.

It’s amazing how much a traveler can do half a world away in the comfort of one’s home. I conducted transactions in multiple currencies; bought hotel rooms at reduced fares; and supplemented information from my Indian friends and coworkers on everything from the different classes of Indian railcars to tropical medicine to plumbing.

Ten years ago planning a trip like this would have required a travel agent, a package tour, or a whole lot of adventurous living by the seat of the pants. Today it’s still an adventure, but one that I could plan (at least a little bit) in advance.

The websites in India are a lot like the sites here. I guess it’s more accurate to say, the web in India looks like it did for America’s big online players about five years ago and like it does for today’s “Mom and Pop” shops.

The Indian web sites I used included some of the most modern and impressive information and e-commerce storefronts around . . . .

These have impressive site design, are easy to use, and inspire confidence.

Of course, I also encountered some of the least usable and least useful sites on the Internet, which I’ve promptly forgotten. Life is too short to bookmark bad sites (except this one.)

Most of what I saw fell in the middle. There were a lot of tourist-themed sites created by package tour organizers with glowing (but out-of-date) information and low-resolution graphics: The Official Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development site — not to be confused with the Official Himachal Pradesh Tourism and Civil Aviation site. These all have the same information and link to the same package tours.

I can forgive these sites. They have their hearts in the right place, and there are numerous civic booster and small businesses sites all over America.

The most maddening were the sites that had the information and services I needed but just weren’t that helpful to the user.

Consider the Indian Railways site, a government site for the train system with the largest number of passenger rail miles in the world and over 1.5 million employees. To reduce corruption, the entire reservation system is computerized. But reservations are only available between 4:00 AM and midnight Indian time, and I dare you to find the time table of the train between New Delhi and Shimla (much less buy tickets).

In the end, the bride’s father bought tickets for us. I almost succeeded but Citibank’s anti-fraud system prevented me from buying tickets and having them delivered to an address in India.

Other remarkable near-misses with Indian e-commerce included a glitch in the otherwise impeccable Taj Hotel system that let me select hotels, dates, and travelers and then wouldn’t let me enter payment information. To be fair, their customer service was better than most American companies, and less than 24 hours later I had reservations in hand.

I’ll finish by drawing another parallel between Indian and American commerce sites. Indian Airlines, the government-owned domestic air carrier, has seen a lof of competition from low-cost carriers like Jet Airways and Air Deccan. I had the opportunity to use all of their reservation systems. Jet Airways seems to use the same reservation system that the American air cartel, Orbitz, uses. Indian Airlines and Deccan seem to use homebrew systems that are clunky and left me wondering whether my orders would go through.

(Try it! Search for flights between Chennai (Madras) and Delhi on each of the sites some time.)

This is pretty much the same experience I had shopping for a self-refrigerating insulating cozy. It’s going to be hot, hot, hot in India, and “insulin is like a dog” . . . at least a dog that prefers to be kept in the fridge. I had a choice of vendors, so I shopped based on price and determined trustworthiness on the appearance of their web sites. In the end, I purchased from a company whose e-commerce felt a lot like Air Deccan or Indian Airlines: straightforward but home-brewed. (Okay, I actually called Cooler Concepts, an American company, to place a phone order; but the dulcet Minnesotan accent on the answering machine assuaged my nerves, I placed the Internet order, and it showed up a few days later.)

So now we’re almost ready to go to India. I expect that Tuesday and Thursday when we’re at U2 concerts I won’t be thinking much about globalization and this country that many in my line of work see catching us, but you can expect to see more in the coming weeks about this nation of contrasts.