I wanted to try and have some down time whilst away on holiday but given I’ve experienced the good and the bad of technology and UX first hand, I felt I needed to put it into a weird sort of holiday journal.
Bear with me, it’s a lengthy one!
My wife and I had booked a holiday for our joint 40th and 10-year anniversary which was our first holiday together in 9 years since having the kids. Unfortunately, due to me having an allergic reaction to some medication we had to cancel the holiday. After a lot of R&R, we decided to try and book a (very) last minute deal.
Going on lastminute.com we found a suitable replacement and went through the process of booking it. The website choices for flights weren’t great with flights taking off and returning to different locations (why is this even a thing?) but I quickly scrolled through and found a set of flights that left and returned to Gatwick. Perfect!
Holiday was booked and what I really liked was that immediately I was prompted to check-in for the flights, the booking page took me straight to EasyJet, all the options that we’d selected on last minute had gone through and it was very smooth. Very nice!
We headed to the airport and did all of the airport security, and I must have been getting too confident with how well it had all gone as then when we looked at getting transfers from the airport (which I thought was 20 mins away), it turned out the airport we were going to was 250km away (2.5-hour drive).
I have taken the blame for being in a rush and it being completely human error, but why would an option be presented for that distance away from a hotel without a warning to the user that that was what they were doing? Why make it easy for a human to make a mistake like that?
So, with a scramble, we managed to fork out for a one-way transfer to the hotel. At least we were going to get there and be able to put our feet up.
Collection at the arrival airport was good and we finally managed to get to the hotel at 4:30am. Tired but excited for our week break, we went to check in.
Now, bear in mind EasyJet had our booking within 30 seconds, the hotel on the other hand had no booking for us nearly 24 hours later. It begs the question as to why was this booking not directly integrated to the hotel considering we had booked it the previous day? Even a simple batch integration running every 24 hours overnight would have got our reservation to them on-time. Even a simple automated email to the hotel with the details would have sufficed!
So, there we stood in reception with the night staff who did their best with English until we eventually managed to convince them to just give us a room to sleep in and we’d work with the morning reception team to solve the issues when we’d be a bit more with it.
A very long story short – we’re here and enjoying our break but there are some key user and business takeaways. Namely:
– as a user, don’t assume that the technology will have your best interests at heart and will tell you if you’re doing something odd.
– businesses, make sure you design your sites with humans in mind. We all make mistakes and this particular one was very costly to rectify for something that could have been simply added as an alert to the web page.
– integration when done well can be hugely positive and a great experience!
– integration when done badly can lead to stress, poor user experience, damage to reputation and fundamentally it just sucks!
At Tratech, we work closely with our clients to work through the challenges and ensure we deliver excellence, be that on UX, Integration, processes or Change Management. If you want to deliver a positive experience to your customers, get in touch.
That was strangely cathartic. Now, where’s that cocktail….
