Customer (User) Experience is Everything
As if, in 2024, there were still a need to explain to large organizations that the customer experience is vital! For the past five days, I went through all sorts of shenanigans and contortions trying to make an airline reservation on Booking.com. In the past, we’d had a good experience booking through them for our hotel needs, so it stood to reason that they should be decent at making reservations for airlines. Well, boy, did I get that wrong. I spent over 6 hours across five days fretting and, worse, getting shoved around with the blame constantly pushed onto everyone else (including myself, my payment methods, and the airlines!). Let me elaborate…
The Ordeal Begins
It began on a Saturday morning when I was investigating options for an upcoming trip, involving an itinerary with a total of four flights. Yes, it was a multi-city journey, a bit more complicated than the norm, but when that was too complex for Booking’s system, I resorted to reserving two separate round trips. To my surprise, the existence and/or availability of flights changed constantly. That’s to say, a flight would show up once, but on a second attempt would not be shown at all. Yet, I persevered and, after refreshing my cache and other such manipulations, was able to locate the four desired flights. Finally, I was ready to book and pay. To my chagrin, however, my payment method was rejected. The message I received was to the effect: “Your payment was not accepted. Please try again later.” I tried again, several times, until finally it became obvious that I’d need to start again. I had to make a brand new reservation. I went through the WHOLE process again, inputting all the necessary information up until payment and… lo and behold, the same problem. Payment rejected. So, I called Booking directly. Despite not having a booking reference (a precondition on their automated answering service), they finally picked up, announcing that this was a subcontracted customer service agency (replete with a poor VoIP line and accent. After a long and inconclusive exchange, the agent finally told me that they’d call me back within 24 hours with a fix for the situation.
- Total time spent: 2 hours
- Level of consternation: 6/10
Phase Two (Purgatory)
By Monday evening (i.e., > 48 hours later), I hadn’t been contacted. So, I tried again to book and pay for the same flights online. Same outcome. I called again. I was told, at this point, to call my credit card company, because the problem was on their end. Another 30 minutes later and I was back to square one. The credit card company didn’t have any indication of any charges, so they could not help. Back to Booking.com. They then told me I’d best use another method of payment. When I went to reserve the same flights, this time, the cost was higher by a couple of hundred pounds. Irked, I pressed ahead and keyed in a different method of payment. To my deepening consternation, that method didn’t work either. Back to Booking.com on the phone. Was I sure I had input the right numbers, she aked. At this point, I was probably being suspected of having a bad credit. When I asked whether they could see my reservation, they candidly replied that, indeed, they could see four reservations under my identity in their system. As to the higher price, they informed me that “that’s out of our hands, as it’s the airlines that control [the pricing].” Since I used to be on the Board at Lastminute.com and started my own travel agency, this type of excuse wasn’t going to get past my BS detector. I firmly informed the agent that this price fluctuation was really a function of the dynamic pricing of the Booking system. Booking was the only one who knew that there was a “rush” on this particular itinerary, in the form of my four concurrent reservation requests. At this point on Monday evening, the price was now £500 more expensive. I decided to wait in order to let the reservations resolve themselves… as in: disappear from the Booking system. After 24 hours, miraculously, the pricing was more or less back to the original pricing from Saturday morning. However, my experience was far from over… and more annoyingly, of course, I didn’t have my tickets secured.
- Total time spent: 1.5 hours
- Level of consternation: 8/10
Phase Three (Purgatory Continues)
On Tuesday, I went back to the mill. I looked at the available tickets and was, of course, miffed that the price was still higher than on Saturday, although £200 lower than the prior day. Things were close to culmination, I thought. Having tried with my own account on Booking.com, I thought that this time I’d try with my wife’s account and her credit. By the time I had logged on, however, the prices were now back to the prior day’s. I balked. I thought I’d wait out one more day to see if the Booking.com prices would return to what I considered ‘normal’ (albeit I should add, all the above prices were considerably less than had I bought directly on the airline’s site). To assuage my angst at not getting the deal done, I looked at a few competitor sites, Skyscanner and Expedia. I also went to Gotogate.com, that is currently owned by Booking Holdings, and according to the Booking.com agent, was “definitely” offering the same options and prices as Booking.com. A cursory look at each of these options, however, came up with blanks, in the form of no seats available or, worse, no flights on that route available. Shrug.
- Total time spent: 1 hour
Level of consternation: 9/10
Phase Four (Hell)
With a glimmer of hope, on day 5, I hopped back onto Booking.com to see what it would offer up. I even thought about changing dates to see if that would get me back to “normal.” And presto, the prices were back to the Saturday levels. I was delighted. I meticulously went through the entire booking process and… well, I should have known. By the time (i.e. 5 minutes) I had arrived at the payment phase and had clicked on “PAY NOW”, Booking.com’s site showed “processing payment” only to send me the following message (words to this effect):“The seats you are looking for have sold out. Please try again with these similar itineraries….” Oy vey. I tried a second time with the same itinerary, but on the preceding day. Again I got through to the very end, hit the PAY NOW button, and bingo: Rejection. Well, fancy that.
- Total time spent: 1+ hour
- Level of consternation: 10/10
Phase Five – Redemption
My fuse had been blown. I ditched booking.com. I then opened up Expedia.co.uk and, half expecting more problems, was blown away by two things. First, the exact itinerary was available on the dates I had always wanted and, more gratifying indeed, the prices were actually lower than Booking.com had ever had… since the initial Saturday! I could even afford (for the same price as Booking) to add some insurance and a bit of peace of mind.
Conclusion
Imagine my level of frustration! It was enough to inspire to write an entire blog post. Is there a cost to a poor customer experience? There’s not just the lost business. There’s the number of times I’m going to need to get this one off my chest. The funny thing is that I don’t expect any of this frustration to land on Boooooooo-king.com management’s ears. On a final note, I recall how I was ‘warned’ that each interaction was going to be recorded… despite that and, even though Booking.com have saved costs by outsourcing their customer service… even though they have a large business…. I would posit to that’s how big businesses eventually go down: with getting the customer experience wrong.
Thank you Expedia, for expediently saving the day.
UPDATE OCTOBER 21 2024
It’s been about three weeks since I managed to book all my trip via Expedia. In the intervening time, Booking has sent me a number of marketing messages, trying to encourage me to book my flights (see below) and/or to book hotels at the destinations that were on my itinerary.
Rather than try its luck on getting new business from me, maybe they should fix the problem first! Would that someone from Booking had responded to this blog post or any of the tweets. Without reaching out to me, the latest Booking.com messages are a nuisance and have become undesirable, aka spam.
