A poor recent online experience has not stopped me using the Internet for shopping and convenience. What it has done, however, is confirmed that some businesses online are as shabby and unprofessional as some on the high street and in real life.
Planning a weekend in Berlin, a girlfriend and I made a bad choice about our accommodation. No-one's fault and not a story for today, but we needed to find a hotel at short notice. Where else to look but LastMinute.com?
We found the hotel at the right price and location for us, with rooms available straight away. I booked and paid for it and received a confirmation email. An hour later, we found ourselves in the stet, looking for the hotel. It was freezing cold and getting late and we discovered that most hotels don't have street numbers, so we needed to focus on the hotel name.
In the end, we found the hotel by luck. No longer called 'Grand City Hotel Ku'damm', it was now the 'Tryp'. Not an obvious change of name and not very helpful when you're cold, tired and actually still suffering from a fractured shoulder and in need of sleep.
On returning to the UK, I contacted LastMinute to ask for some clarification of why their website showed a different name to that on the outside of the hotel. After several emails, they simply denied it was a problem. Would like to have had them walking the Berlin streets looking for their hotel! There seems nothing to be done. Obviously, I will never use LastMinute again, but they will neither notice nor care.
What the experience proved to me was that there are good businesses and bad businesses. Whether they are online or real is immaterial. We perhaps all need to be better at sharing the bad experiences to get organisations listening to customers and behaving in a more professional way.
Posted via my iPad
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