I was reading a case on the Consumerist website last week
about someone who had booked a hotel through Hotels.com in Croatia, only to
arrive at the address specified and find no trace of a hotel. By itself this
wasn’t a complete business failure; the company does not own any of the hotels
it offers to book for you, and their site has plenty of disclaimers about what
happens if they book you into a hotel that is unavailable on the day you’re
supposed to check in. Where the situation became truly farcical – and what led
to the inevitable mockery by thousands of scruffy bloggers as well as everyone
who visits the Consumerist site – is that when the failure was reported to
them, Hotels.com had no procedure in place for verifying the existence of the
hotel, getting the customer to a different property for the night, refunding
the booking fees, or anything else that might have satisfied the customer and
defused the situation…
As a result, the customer wound up being put on hold for
hours at a time while the company insisted that the hotel in question really
existed, even though no one there ever answers the phone. This would be asinine
enough if the customer had just called in and questioned the transaction from
home, but Hotels.com was actually doing this while their patron was standing in
front of the abandoned building, reporting the lack of a hotel being present.
And while the customer did eventually get their money back for the booking that
didn’t exist, they had to spend hours fighting with the company, and have still
not been compensated for the International cell phone call they made on the
night of the dud booking when they were trying to find the non-existent hotel…
Now, I’m not suggesting that this one lost booking is going
to hurt the company; it’s quite possible that even the Internet mockery that
has resulted and all of the hundreds (or millions; it’s hard to tell) of net
citizens who will never do business with Hotels.com will have no effect on the
company’s fortunes. But if this sort of thing keeps happening it will
eventually harm the company’s reputation beyond any hope of the new series of
animated cartoons being able to gloss things over, and eventually the company
will destroy itself (and all of the people who work for it, sell things to it
or own it) simply because whoever is running operations is not only too lazy to
verify that all properties listed not only exist but respond to their
customers, but also too lazy to train the customer service personnel on how to
handle such a crisis…
Consider, for example, the steps it would take to deal with
this sort of situation. Assuming that a toll-free number that works all over
the world is outside your budget, simply giving your customer service people
the ability to call someone back – and the authority to do so – will cut off
both the International on-hold problem and the attendant costs (and demand for
reimbursement). Having a policy of checking on the existence and quality of
hotels you work with would cut down on the number of non-existent properties
you book; so would having contract language that specifies how long your
business partners have to respond to your calls – and the penalties they will
pay if they don’t. And it certainly wouldn’t take much to develop relationships
with back-up and substitute properties, so that if all else fails you can
divert abandoned customers to somewhere that does exist…
If none of those things are possible (or economically
viable; I don’t know how much tourist traffic goes to Split, Croatia in a given
year), then at the very least you could have warnings on your website and
disclaimers in your contract language regarding hotels in parts of the world
for which you can’t guarantee performance – or, in extreme cases, existence. This
won’t stop the occasional problem from slipping through the cracks, or keep the
occasional lazy or stupid customer from looking in the wrong place for their
hotel property, but it will go a long way towards ending this type of mistake
and its attendant Internet mockery…
Of course, the key measure to take is giving your customer
service personnel the ability to handle such cases in the first place, as well
as the tools to do so. But that’s a discussion for another day…
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