Tsk tsk
Posted on May 01, 2003 @ 16:46 in General
Next week I will be in Seattle for a conference. I'll be arriving a bit early so I can sleep off my jetlag and see a bit of the city. I was trying to book a hotel room through the Travelodge website and finding a suitable location and room is easy enough, but the Travelodge reservation form really doesn't work all that well.
First I was trying to make a reservation with Opera. Filling out the (secure) form was not a problem, only when trying to submit it, the website reported that there had been an otherwise unqualified problem. "Please click back on your browser and fill out the form correctly." Right... only now the submit button wouldn't work anymore. Okay, new window, find room, fill out form, submit... sorry, still a 'problem'. Why bother telling your customers exactly what went wrong with filling out your form? They're probably going to try again, again and again in the hope of getting it right... no?
Maybe it's Opera, I thought. I fired up Internet Explorer and tried again. Hey... look! Instead of offering me a room rate of 207 USD for 3 nights, now it's offering me a rate of 187 USD for 3 nights. Silly thing. Okay... fill out form, submit... ugh, still 'problems' with the form. So I go back again and start tweaking the zipcode and telephone number. We Dutch probably use slightly different ways of noting those than this silly form is expecting. And lo! after only 5 or 6 tries I finally found a way to enter the information in such a way that the form would accept it. I guess the 'problem' had nothing to do with Opera after all, but jeez, guys... if you're getting an overseas reservation, please don't have your system apply the same rules to determine whether the form has been filled out correctly as you would for national (American) reservations.
Anyway... I just made a very easy 20 bucks, so I shouldn't complain too much :-)
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