{"id":1459,"date":"2010-07-15T10:14:04","date_gmt":"2010-07-15T17:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talesfromthe.net\/jon\/?p=1459"},"modified":"2010-07-15T10:14:04","modified_gmt":"2010-07-15T17:14:04","slug":"its-a-service-business-did-expedia-fail-to-get-the-memo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/2010\/07\/15\/its-a-service-business-did-expedia-fail-to-get-the-memo\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s a service business. Did Expedia fail to get the memo?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"D’s organization Privacy Activism is going to be debuting the graphic novel Networked: Carabella on the Run<\/a> at ComiCon … how cool is that?\u00c2\u00a0 So I was making plane reservations for her.\u00c2\u00a0 We usually fly Alaska Airlines up and down the west coast — after a decade of doing the two-city thing, we’re “MVP golds” which means that if necessary they’ll kick off the co-pilot to give us a seat.\u00c2\u00a0 But since she needs to stop in San Francisco on the way it turned out to be a lot cheaper to do the SF\/San Diego leg on another airline.\u00c2\u00a0 So I turned to Expedia.<\/p>\n

After filling everything out, I hit the “pay for booking now” button.\u00c2\u00a0 It whirled around for quite a while and eventually told me<\/p>\n

\"Your<\/a><\/p>\n

Drat.\u00c2\u00a0 I hate software<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 I tried again; same result.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 I switched to another credit card.\u00c2\u00a0 No dice.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 So I called it a night and went to sleep.<\/p>\n

This morning when I got up, I once again got the same message.\u00c2\u00a0 So I phoned the toll-free number, waited on hold for a long time, and finally talked with a reservation agent.\u00c2\u00a0 After having me read the information to her, she tood all my information again over the phone, and told me she’d made the reservation manually.\u00c2\u00a0 Ooops, it turns out that there had been a fare change.\u00c2\u00a0 Was that okay with me?\u00c2\u00a0 Yes it was.\u00c2\u00a0 She tried again.<\/p>\n

“It’s taking a long time … there’s a lot of latency today … don’t worry, I’m still on the line …\u00c2\u00a0 Oh.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m getting the same error message you did.\u00c2\u00a0 So, you should just try to make the reservation yourself later.”<\/p>\n

“Yeah but I’ve tried quite a few times already.”<\/p>\n

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”<\/p>\n

I stared at the phone, not sure what to say.\u00c2\u00a0 Eventually I said, “You know, I’m not having a good experience here.\u00c2\u00a0 I spent time online with your software and waited for quite a while on hold, and then spent a lot of time with you, and still don’t have my reservation.”\u00c2\u00a0 When she didn’t respond, I said, “Well, maybe I’ll just call the airline directly.”<\/p>\n

“Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?”<\/p>\n

Sigh.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, Virgin Atlantic’s site worked just fine.<\/p>\n

And there are plenty of other search engines out there — bye-bye Expedia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

D’s organization Privacy Activism is going to be debuting the graphic novel Networked: Carabella on the Run at ComiCon … how cool is that?\u00c2\u00a0 So I was making plane reservations for her.\u00c2\u00a0 We usually fly Alaska Airlines up and down the west coast — after a decade of doing the two-city thing, we’re “MVP golds” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}