Why is the on-line booking experience so poor, so often?

the familiar topic of Online Travel Booking Frustration is discussed in a post on Travel Rants Today

This topic always makes our ears prick up since it is one of the main drivers for Offer Me aTrip’s formation.

Companies make enormous investments in marketing, PR and brand building. They do this because they want us to like them, they want us to buy their product, and after that they want us to come back and buy again.

Sadly, and all too often, this investment rapidly comes to naught as customers hit a brick wall half way through an on-line purchase, or as they struggle with impenetrable functionality, or grapple with some other confounding corporate behaviour. We’ve all scratched our heads far too frequently as we try to decipher an error message, wonder why a drop-down box is blank, end up in the same place that we started, or try to comprehend some strange on-line corporate policy.

It must be run by morons

Apart from physically inhibiting sales and negating all that expensive marketing, poor on-line design can leave customer with the impression that the company doesn’t care and lead them to the conclusion that it must be run by morons. Which says nothing for the product.

Having frequently been frustrated by poor on-line experiences, ensuring that Offer Me aTrip provides a simple, effective, enjoyable and hassle free user experiences has been our core aim since starting the project.  In truth we’ve spent rather too much time so far in obsessing over this – but we think it is time well spent. We also think it is time we will continue to spend and a goal we will continue to chase.

With that in mind, we much enjoyed a blog post by Dustin Curtis, calling out American Airlines in an open letter for their “horrific” on-line experience.

I’m a user interface designer. I travel sometimes. Recently, I had the horrific displeasure of booking a flight on your website, aa.com. The experience was so bad that I vowed never to fly your airline again. But before we part ways, I have some questions and two suggestions for you.

Dustin’s post is a great read – highly recommended. But it gets better. A ‘user experience’ architect from American wrote a fascinatingly candid email under the pseudonym of Mr X, providing an all too familiar insight into the organisational and managerial issues which lead to such experiences (I say familiar, because anybody who has worked in a large organisation will have some similar experience).

So obviously the story ends happily with American Airlines using the experience to learn and improve, making huge amounts of profit in the process.

Um, no. Mr X was promptly fired. 

Never mind

In a new post, Mr X talks of an example where a firm deliberately tries to obfuscate the customer for financial gain, undermining an expensive branding effort. I recall a similar experience with a telecoms firm whilst discussing implementation of a contract cancellation policy. It started well enough: we should let customers cancel contracts early in certain circumstances where it would have been unreasonable for us to insist on completing the duration. But it ended badly: we should not make this process easy or obvious.

My view was, and still is, that alienating a customer for the sake of a hundred pounds makes poor business sense looking at how much is spent on acquiring customers in the first place (usually much much more).

It is amazing how many companies just can’t get past the simple equation: good will spend – bad will stupidity = profit. In the meantime, this is a great opportunity for us and we look forwards to watching our customers judge us on it.