10 things that annoy me when booking holidays online
4 04 2008Today I read a great post on Travelrants called Ten things that annoy me about booking holidays online. Darren made a list of 10 things that annoy him while booking holidays online.
It’s clearly the kind of feedback/information people that work for Online Travel Agencies or Hotel Portals would love to gather from their visitors. That’s why I have decided to add my 2 cent and make my own list of things that really annoy me while booking online. Hopefully other bloggers will continue the discussion and post their own list on their blog! That would be VERY interesting!
Here goes my list:
- Being obligated to create a member account before I can get all the details of a (potential) booking.
- Searching for hours for the cancellation fees of a hotel before I complete a booking.
- Not knowing the total price of a booking before I filled out any personal information.
- Not being able to use a booking engine with Firefox!
- Promotions that never match my holidays periods.
- Getting an expired sessions of a search when being idle for a short period of time.
- Chosing to book a flight, filling out ALL the personal information asked (including credit card number) and getting an error message saying it’s not available anymore (but still offered and listed on-site and on all travel meta search engines).
- Browsing a little deeper to know the services a hotel is offering, and not being able to get back to the result page I came from.
- Picking an available hotel room, and discovering that was not a real time displayed availability and that an email that has been sent to the hotelier, who replies room is not available anymore for this period of the year.
- Having to query availability/rates twice. Once for displaying the system cache of available hotels of the site, and another time for confirming the hotel is really available at that rate!
That’s my list, I hope travel bloggers will follow that “10 annoying things” thread and add their personal opinions. If you do so please add a trackback to this post so we can follow you.
Professionals are, of course, invited to comment my list.
Darren Cronian, experience, online travel, travelrants
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Hey,
I like your site. Lots of good information…..I subcribed to your feed…
Feel free to come check out mine. http://www.nomadicmatt.com
cheers!
@Matt: Thank you for your words. I’ll definitely check your website tonight!
@Matt: That would be great if you could follow up this post on your blog, this way you will share with Darren and I what’s annoying YOU when booking online. What do you think?
Great list, I’ve found that booking travel on http://travel.halogenguides.com Halogen Guides Travel is pretty painless.
[…] on Abril 11, 2008. En ingles se esta expandiendo por internet un tema relacionado con las cosas que nos molestan al realizar la […]
@Eric: I understand you might love the company you work for, but your comment doesn’t look like very objective unless you add a few concrete facts that explain how painless it is to book on that website!
(Otherwise it might be considered as a spam comment..)
[…] Blog On Travel find out 10 things that annoy travelers while booking a vacation online. Fortunately, making a […]
Another one is the seat you selected online is not really the seat you get in real life.
@Sylvain - To your first point on the list, the site doesn’t require a member account to get all the potential details on the booking, even though the site aggregates travel packages in the same vein as Kayak.
[…] http://www.blogontravel.com/10-things-that-annoy-me-when-booking-holidays-online/ […]
is very interesting what they write, also accepted by us for our site or at least we try. is in the process of working but we hope can become a good reference site for bloggers travelers worldwide. Hello, thanks for your suggestions. http://www.qtour.it
@Qtour: Hello. Thanks for passing by. I’m pleased to know that my list may have helped you to improve your site! See you around.
Many thanks, i hope to came in my site and i wait your comment , is very important for me .
Hi Sylvain
Thanks for a great post - found it via a link from another travel blog. But have now added you to my list of feeds. Definately the kind of thing we would love to get from our users. What do you think would be the best way to get this kind of info from your users?
We’re about to do some usability testing - so I’m reading on up on how best to do this. I think the overall rule is stand near them and keep quiet
Cheers - Gareth
-Moderated comment-
The failure to offer realtime bookings or information is a real nightmare. I booked a hoiday with onthebeach, a UK travel agency. My room was bumped a few days before Christmas for a New Years Eve holiday. I was told to find an alternative hotel on their website “because they are a web business”. I wasted ages doing this. Then had to phone to confirm and was told I had basically wasted my time - their web site was nt updated and the hottel I found available on their web site wasnt!. The only thing worse than using their website was dealing with them over the phone!
Maybe an eleventh worst thing about online bookings is when they are an excuse for dreadful person to person customer service - this was my experience with these guys.
Well its really seems annoying. Although i hav’nt visited many of the sites like these but still from some of them,it really make difference.
Hi Hemant: What makes a difference?
Hi! I am a reader of your blog. I created my own. If you want to visit it, my blog is: http://www.turisteca.blogspot.com
Bye!
Luciana