Visit London is the official visitor organisation for London. They receive public funding from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. They employ about 70 staff. They run a very important service encouraging tourists worldwide to visit our capital city. And their search engine is unexpectedly bloody useless. Here's why.
I'm going to test out Visit London's website by asking the question What special events are taking place in London tomorrow? That should be simple enough for London's official visitor website to answer. Let's see how they do.
Start here:The What's On Special Events homepage Three special events have been prominently highlighted at the top of the page, one of which is tomorrow's London Judo Festival at the ExCel exhibition centre. Sounds special enough... except that this event was cancelledthree weeks ago. Surely somebody should have noticed by now? Next on the page come three bookable events (none of them this weekend) followed by 14 special 'Features'. Only acouple of these featured events are taking place tomorrow. Most are weeks or even months away, including Trooping the Colour (4 months to go), the Tour de France Grand Départ (5 months) and the Notting Hill Carnival (6 months). Great for forward planning, but useless for the immediate future. Looks like we need to dig deeper. See the word 'tomorrow' just above 'Book Tickets'? Let's click on that...
Next:Show all special events for... tomorrow "You searched for all events, in Special events, for 10 Feb 2007 to 11 Feb 2007. Your search returned 870 results." Hang on, I only asked for events tomorrow, but this bungling website has decided I meant "tomorrow and the day after" instead. No I don't, I really only want tomorrow. I'll have to Refine the search myself...
Next:Refine your search - When? From 10 Feb 2007 to 10 Feb 2007 "Your search returned 854 results" What, seriously? 854 special events taking place in London tomorrow? That's fantastic - what a choice! Although this might make finding the really special events quite difficult, mightn't it? Let's start at the top of the list of 854 events and work our way down...
Event 1:20th Century Decorative Arts, Sothebys [30 Jan 2007 to 13 Mar 2007] Clicking through to the information page reveals that this is an evening course, run twice over three consecutive Tuesdays. It doesn't actually happen on a Saturday at all. It shouldn't be on the list.
Event 4:Act For Fun, Lantern, SW20 [1 Jan 2006 to 31 Dec 2007] Clicking through to the information page reveals that this is a paid-for theatre workshop which takes place every Tuesday evening in Raynes Park. It doesn't actually happen on a Saturday at all. It shouldn't be on the list.
Event 5 and Event 8 happen every Saturday, but you had to enrol your child several weeks ago. Event 6 happens every Tuesday and Event 7 every Thursday. Event 9 only happens on the final Friday of the month. And Event 10 isn't an event at all, it's the children's activity cart at the V&A. I don't know about you, but I've lost all interest in scrolling any further down the list. If there is an appropriate one-day-only event amongst the remaining 844 listed activities, I really can't be bothered to hunt it down.
The problem here is the incompetent design of the Visit London events database. Every event has been labelled according to its start and finish dates, not by the dates on which it actually happens. Most recurring events have been labelled "1 Jan 2006 to 31 Dec 2007" and so apparently happen every day for two years, even though they don't. And the database isn't being updated properly either. It's no good searching for events by date at all, because all you get is a sprawling inaccurate date-irrelevant list.
I rue the relentless rise of database-driven websites. No longer are we treated to carefully considered internet pages written by sentient humans, just computer-generated lists created from input search criteria. You can't just browse any more, you have to ask questions first. And the Visit London database can't answer those questions properly, and so churns out garbage instead. What a waste of a potentially very useful resource.
I wanted to contact Visit London to tell them what I thought of their wholly ineffective search engine, except they insist I register with the site before they'll let me email them. Stuff that. So I've had to find some proper special events happening in London tomorrow via othersources. Much easier. Here's five, if you're interested:
