Trying to book a flight for an upcoming trip. Against my better judgment, the nonstop flight woos me and I try to book on an anonymous airline that tries to parade as the airline of the country.When I get to “purchase ticket”, it tells me to be careful and not hit anything twice, double booking, etc. I watch for two seconds and switch to a window to book a hotel. A few minutes later I return to the website to be greeted by a message that said their server timed out, the IT guys went on strike, or a nuclear bomb destroyed their reservations facility. I hit the back button on my browser to be greeted with a confirmation page that has retained none of my information.Now I have no idea if they’ve billed me or not. I’ve got no confirmation email and my guess is no. So I click the little “chat with an agent” button to be greeted with a nice window telling me all agents are busy. If I want to get an agent, I should close the little popup window and click on the same button I just clicked to get this notice. I don’t think I want to spend the rest of my night trying to see if there are agents chatting with customers (my guess is they all went home at 5pm EDT).So which is easier:
- Spending probably an hour of my time trying to confirm that I don’t have a flight booked and trying to rebook it, or
- Confirming with my credit card that no charges went through and/or canceling them if they did and booking on one of the three airlines I normally travel and KNOW their web site works.
Hmmm…No wonder they went bankrupt. Glad our tax dollars saved this airline from destruction.
Make it easy for customers to buy.
Well, it didn’t take long to get through. I just said I had a reservation (which turned out to be a lie, but I didn’t know it at the time) and no touch-tone phone and they patched me right through. We confirmed I didn’t have a flight, and the very nice lady (who I suspect was physically about 10 time zones away) gave me the price for my flight, and tossed out a $15 service charge. I asked what that was for and she said it was a fee they charged for booking over the phone.I explained that their web site had failed me and asked her to waive the charge. She refused. I asked her to relay to her supervisors that they were a bunch of nitwits and hung up.
Was in a store today to discuss financing options. Everyone looked busy until a woman looked up and asked if I was being helped yet. I responded, “not yet.” She went back to her task and made no effort to help me herself or call someone else over who could. I think I prefer being ignored unintentionally better:)