Why is booking so difficult?

[YB88]

Frustrating - you could use Expedia or something similar.

It's sort of like deciding whether you would like to be shot or hung --- you're dead either way. The issue with using a third party intermediary is that if anything goes wrong, you have the prospect of airline and booking agency pointing the finger at each other, leaving you in the middle, plus having to deal with the problem through a third party. If the airlines weren't so bad at their basic business of collecting revenue from potential customers (!), I would definitely rather book direct.

Sometimes you can book through an alliance partner with which you already have a 'relationship' (login, password, basic travel info already stored). I'm currently trying to book a flight from Geneva to Bergen. SAS is the obvious airline, one that I've never done business with. Delta is a partner, and I have delta points to spend --- but I can't find that flight on the delta site.

It seems like it's always something.

 

[YB88]

I have run into the "different browser" issue.

There is ONE of my bills that does not like Firefox and I need to use Edge.

Currently, 54% of the U.S. population uses Chrome, 31% use Safari, the remaining 15% spread among Edge, Firefox and others. If an airline isn't testing their stuff with Chrome they're absolute idiots. I don't mean to suggest that they're NOT idiots, but still ...

I used Firefox for many years, until I started encountering sites that clearly hadn't tested with it. It currently has about a 3.7% market share, so I reluctantly embraced my inner Google fanboy and switched to Chrome --- so that when I go to a random website I'm a lot less likely to run into issues with html that wasn't tested to work with my browser.

 

[YB88]

Have you tried using a travel agent/ advisor? . I’m reasonably tech savvy and can usually manage booking websites on my own. When booking trips with International flights. multiple modes/ accommodations and locations we have a travel agent who makes the actual arrangements for us with the flights and places we want to use. She also applies carrier credits ie. Cruise next credits for NCL to get us the best rates possible. It may be old school but it sure saves us time and aggravation without additional cost.

I might go back to a travel agent, in part because of this. I tried one in the past; my wife and I like to do individual travel with nuances that became too tedious to try to work through an intermediary. Having to check and then correct what the agent wanted to do ended up being more work than just booking myself.

Two reasons I might try again.
(1) As we age, we'll perhaps switch to doing more of the all inclusive "soup to nuts" types of things, though that might be relatively easy to book on our own anyway.
(2) When COVID hit, we had booked a very detailed elaborate trip in New Zealand and Australia. Having to unwind all of that myself was a bunch more work, that ideally an agent would take care of for me?

It's definitely an option. I wonder, though, will the rise of AI make it harder for agents to stay in business, and what one can expect from an agent these days? A whole different topic, on which I'm quite ignorant.

 

[YB88]

While it might be a browser issue, I have often found that glitches like these are due to my ad blocker or some other Chrome/Firefox extension messing with the web page. My first step nowadays when something like this happens is to disable both my ad-blocker and pop-up blocker, then reload the page. Also, some browsers (such as Brave) are configured by default to block lots of stuff, so best to use a different one when this kind of thing happens.

Excellent observation and one that I didn't think to try. This has bitten me before and it's a devil's choice. One some sites the moving ads and popups can get overwhelming.
Thanks for pointing that out, I need to keep it in mind all the time I guess.

 

[Flyfish1]

I might go back to a travel agent, in part because of this.

Yep - we started doing that recently. Only because we met nice people on a trip and their young daughter was a travel agent. Turned out to be a good thing. So easy...

 

[Luvtoride]

I might go back to a travel agent, in part because of this. I tried one in the past; my wife and I like to do individual travel with nuances that became too tedious to try to work through an intermediary. Having to check and then correct what the agent wanted to do ended up being more work than just booking myself.

Two reasons I might try again.
(1) As we age, we'll perhaps switch to doing more of the all inclusive "soup to nuts" types of things, though that might be relatively easy to book on our own anyway.
(2) When COVID hit, we had booked a very detailed elaborate trip in New Zealand and Australia. Having to unwind all of that myself was a bunch more work, that ideally an agent would take care of for me?

It's definitely an option. I wonder, though, will the rise of AI make it harder for agents to stay in business, and what one can expect from an agent these days? A whole different topic, on which I'm quite ignorant.

YB88, I can give you the contact info of our travel agent. She is remote anyway and we communicate via email and phone.

I was told by a cruise line rep recently that she does an excellent job of utilizing our cruise credits for the maximum discounts possible.

 

[brett]

A number of years ago we were trying to book three nights in Portugal on the Thomson web site. Thomson is one of the worlds largest travel companies. They operate tours, airlines, cruise ships, etc. They also sell of pre purchased days at hotels that they have not been able to sell. We have used them for Europe and for Mexico.

In any event, nothing would work. I could not book on line. Tried multiple different credit cards then assumed it was because they were non UK cards.

After a few days it dawned on my that perhaps the issue was with our home address (in Canada). So I tried again, but this time I used the address of the hotel in Seville, Spain where we happened to be at the time. Worked like a charm...reservation went through. It would seem that they wanted a UK or and EU address. Problem solved!

Surprising what some of these sites appear to key on.

 

[NoiseBoy]

Yeah, as all my browsers were dying (because my ancient Mac was years out of date) I finally could do nothing - except buy a new computer. Might be your computer as well as your browser. Ridiculous, but these things don't last very long any more. Of course my Mac hardware STILL w*rks but simply is a useless pile of chips now.

Same here. My 2013 MacBook Air still works just fine (it's always plugged in), but the latest Mac OS it can accept is Catalina. Unfortunately, there's a productivity app that I use for my hobby sound business that won't run on that anymore. Not to mention of course that the browsers are all out of date. I'm currently shopping used Mac Minis since I don't actually need this computer to move. Beyond the expense of replacing perfectly working hardware is the time it takes to transition to a new computer while getting almost nothing for the effort. All computers have been fast enough for my simple needs since around the time that started installing SSD hard drives in them. Heck, the Windows 7 Pro machine that I replaced last year was running just fine, but I bricked it myself by upgrading the firmware on my WiFi Access Point. That got me a new level of security that my old laptop could not "speak." Sigh.

 

[brett]

I have never not been able to book a travel buy on the web. A few times it took a second try or a second try on an alternate web site.

Either way it was not a big deal.

We wanted to book 2 o/w seats Calgary-Bangkok on Korean Airlines using our Delta points. The Delta flights required 40 percent more points. We also preferred KAL. It seemed that I could only book one at a time. We only had so many points in our account and were concerned that the point requiement for the second seat might increase after we booked the first.

So I simply picked up the phone and called the Skymiles folks. Five minutes later we had our flights, seats, the lot. Ten minutes later complete email verification and itinerary details.

Seems to me that there is always a way to get it done without a large amount of angst. Either on a different website, different computing platform, or even by the old fashion method of phoning. You just have to be a little flexible!