Stupid web business: number 38 in a series of millions
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Internet, e-commerce on
Like many people, I book our family holidays online these days. With young kids, we tend to stay within the confines of the UK and opt for a holiday cottage rental. Now there are numerous sites offering the ability to search for and book such a holiday cottage, covering the UK and beyond. They work by taking a fee from the owner of the cottage for each successful booking. They also seem to suffer from what I like to call the Tottenham Court Road effect whereby it used to be the case that you could not play one shop off of another in TCR when buying electrical goods because most of them were owned by the same people. So it is with the holiday cottage rental industry, the numerous differently branded services seem to come back to just one or two companies in the end.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, we found our ideal little cottage snuggled deep in a forest in North Wales for the dates we needed and paid a deposit back in July 2007. believe me, to get the good ones you do need to book that early! The balance of the rental is due tomorrow, although Cottages4You do not seem that keen on taking my money.
Being a good web warrior I attempted to pay online last night using the secure payment server, only to discover that the secure payment server did not want my money for a reason that wasn’t forthcoming. The error it returned was simply that it could not proceed with the transaction and I should try again or call the office and pay over the telephone. Well, what with it being after office hours I decided to try again. This time I got a different error, apparently the secure payment server was not actually working at the moment and would I mind awfully phoning the office. I gave it one more chance today, trying the elusive payments server again. yep, you guessed it, call the office is said.
So I called the office, debit card in hand, ready to pay the rental balance which was fast approaching its due date deadline. Here’s a precis of the conversation:
Cottages4You - Hello how can I help?
Me - I’d like to pay my final rental balance please
Cottages4You - Do you have your booking reference?
Me - Yes, it is XXXXXXXXXX
Cottages4You - Have you just tried to pay on the Internet?
Me - Yes, it wouldn’t let me
Cottages4You - Sorry, when an Internet payment attempt fails it locks us out of accepting payments on your account for 20 minutes so you will have to call back later
Me - <flabberghasted silence before hanging up>
Can you bloody well believe it, in this era of web based transactions where immediacy and availability are often the only thing that differentiate one service from another, that a company can be so daft? Customers are encouraged by Cottages4You to pay via the secure server, and when it barfs through no fault of those customers they are then unable to pay over the telephone– despite the website telling them to do just that. It really does drive me mad; mad enough to probably not bother using this service for future rentals. I’ll try the old fashioned method and pick up a copy of Daltons Weekly in order to approach the landlords directly instead. I might even save some money, not to mention sanity, in the process…
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