Thursday 5 August 2010

Travel and the middle-man

Despite of knowing better, for reasons unknown (or was it so that an offer was very good - or seemingly so, of course) I made the mistake of using an internet-based travel middle-man (these low margin businesses seem to be all over nowadays) to make some reservations earlier this summer. And problems I got. Guess if you can get hold of this Swedish middle-man when the excrement hits the fan in scorched place far from home. And guess if they want you to be able to in the first place. This is a very common phenomenon in internet-based business.

The customer service is basically designed to be difficult to reach. When standing at the lobby desk of a 5 star hotel and realizing that you have to pay for an extra night (that you thought you had already paid for), there's nobody to help you to sort things out. And when you get back, it takes over 20 days to get an answer to your complaint. And the attitude is very poor indeed, and one becomes suspicious that maybe they do not answer many complaints at all. The business is low margin and any compensation will turn the transaction to red immediately. Nevertheless, these people like to pour money into advertising, but their marketing has not reached the level on which they would do the very professional thing of starting to calculate and compare the cost of getting a new customer versus retaining an old one..

Always deal with carriers and hotels etc. directly. Lesson learned. And a good reminder it is of the fact that I can be a fool in so many ways.

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