74 16 - 29 October 2019 Do you agree? Let us know [email protected]
of Teletext listings to find the holiday of
their drea ms. And Teletext Holidays is
still going online today, a decadeor
more after Teletext itself vanished, such
is the affe ction people have for that
brand – even though the experience
could barely have been more tedious.
Unbelievably, booking
holidays and flights
online has become even
more painful. Websites
routinely don’t work
properly and, even
when they do, they
often work against you.
When flight-booking
websites crank up their
prices because they’ve clocked you’re a
repeat vi sitor and they now know you’re
definitely interested – guess what?
People get angry. And even if many of
these sharp prac tices are getting
weededout of th e industry – either
through ti ghter regulation orbecause
firms have been caught red-handed –Barry Collins says technology is partly to
blame for Thomas Cook’s demise
Page 404
it absolutely destroys customer trust.
Can you blame people for wanting to
look a human travel agent in the eye
when they can’t trust the prices on the
screen in front of th em?
Even when your holiday is booked,
the travel agents use technology to
blackmail you for more money. A few
weeks before we set off on the holiday
that we eventually booked with Tui,
emails started arriving encourag ing us
to reserve specific se ats on the plane,
accompanied by a live mapshowing
that there were only a few left
unreserved. The messag e was clear –
expect to spend the 10-hour flight sat
apar t from your children if you don’t pay
the extra £100 or so it co sts to reserve
seats. It’s extortion, pure and simple.
Millions of people have lost their
holidays and tens of th ousands of
people have lost their jobs – in part,
because Thomas Cook’s technology
was nowhere neargoodenough.
Sadly, they won’t be the last.When Iwas a lad,
prospective sunseekers had
to wade through pages of
Teletext listings to find the
holiday of their dreams“
D
on’t just book it,Thomas
Cook it,”was the now
defunct travel agent’s slogan
when Iwas a kid. Ifmy
recent experience of booking online with
the company is anythingto go by, the
slogan should have been “you just can’t
book it whenyou ThomasCook it”.
Like virtually every travel-agent
website I can think of, Thomas Cookdid
a woeful jo b of handlin g online bookings.
My efforts to secure two hotel ro oms for
my family were re peatedly thwarted at
the final confirmation screen – after I’d
laboriously entered every detail,
tweaked every flight and selected all the
non-optional extras – because the
rooms we wanted were now inexplicably
unavailable. Only when I finally brok e
and spent 30 minutes hanging on the
company’s telephone helpline did a
harassed memberof staff confess that
she had no idea why I couldn’t book
them. Computer said ‘no’.
So, when I read that Thomas Cook still
had anexpensive fleet of 600 bricks-
and-mortar stor es that hugely
exacerbated the company’s already
monumental
losses , I wasn’t
the leas t bit
surp rised.
Having lost
the plot myself
with the travel
agent’s brok en
online booking
system, I could
see why it would be preferable to get
Sandra at the high-street branch to take
over the task of screaming at her screen
in frustration.
Online travel booking should have
been an open goal for these firms. Back
when I was a lad, prospective sunseekers
had to wade through pagesand pages Illustra
tion
:Andr
ew
To
rr
ens