Websites are being neglected by mangement
My wife has been traveling to Iceland recently and I’ve been trying various hotels. I stayed first in the Interurban in Tukwila hotel (nice hotel with a couple of quirks; watch for my TripAdvisor review soon … I’m EpicureWA on that one.)
I need to stay in another hotel while the carpets are getting cleaned and I tried to book online a hotel we’ve stayed at in the past several times with our little dog during power outages. I had forgotten about it: the Embassy Suites in Tukwila, also.
But this is a Hilton property too, and I tried to book using their website and could not get it to work! I first got a note on the site saying I had to register with Hilton Honors … I have several email addresses and finally found the one they were using and got my password updated, but I just couldn’t get the reservation thing to work after 30 minutes of trying.
Web technology is a well-understood technology now; if Hilton isn’t willing to invest in people or technology to handle it I don’t plan to use Hilton hotels again.
Another one today! Whirlpool … I was just trying to order a water filter for the refrigerator in our rental house, which I did last year with no problems at all; this time the website first:
- Cancelled my order
- Said “I couldn’t charge your payment info due to a problem in our system; try again later”
- I called customer service and was put on hold for 15 minutes or more to get one human, and when I said “water filter” got on hold for another 10 with another guy who finally took my order over the phone.
It’s much cheaper for the companies and customers if they would just invest enough in websites. This is the third or fourth one I’ve experienced recently.
