Sunday Times (London), May 9, 2004, Sunday
SECTION: Features; News Review 10
LENGTH: 1634 words
HEADLINE: E-travel? Hold on tight
BYLINE: Stewart Mitchell
BODY:
One in three trips from the UK was arranged online in 2003, but our internet travel services are generally dismal.
Stewart Mitchell explains how organising your holiday can soon turn into a rollercoaster ride from hell
Fifty years ago, the first package tour to Spain brought inter-national
travel to the masses. Today, the web brings the world to our desktops. Anyone
with an internet connection can play travel agent and routinely find wickedly
cheap flights or camel treks in Timbuktu.
The research firm Mintel says that last year, one in three journeys from the
UK was booked on the web. As more people opt for the flexibility of independent
travel, this growing market is expected to be worth £5 billion by 2007.
Yet booking a trip online can resemble a rollercoaster ride -an exciting but
fraught white-knuckle journey into the unknown. Many are the pitfalls and gaps
in service, and online travel agents often offer the customer little protection.
Talk to travellers who have arranged trips on the internet and they usually have
a cautionary story of woe, such as the two geographically challenged young
Britons who arrived -swimsuits and sun cream at the ready -in chilly Sydney,
Nova Scotia, when they had expected sunny Sydney, Australia.
A definite case of "user error" there, but a recent report by a research
consultancy damns Britain's online travel services not only as woefully
inadequate, but as some of the worst in the world. Five UK websites (Flybe,
Ryanair, Bridge the World, Holiday Autos and Travel Bag) are rated bottom of the
heap of 46 sites tested by Shelley Taylor & Associates (STA).
The report, Click-Here Commerce, notes that travel sites are unfriendly to
use, weak on information and poor on customer service. The total price is often
not clear until the end of the booking pro-cess and cancellation can be
expensive.
"Travel-booking sites fall far behind other e-commerce operations, such as
Amazon," says Shelley Taylor, the publisher of the report. "They are all guilty
of failing to deliver satisfying travel experiences. It is not sufficient simply
to enable travellers to book and pay. Travel sites should offer the same level
of service and support as their land-based equivalents."
David Bland, an internet-savvy Home Office worker based in Heathrow, is one
of many well-connected holiday-hunters who agrees. He understands travel, yet
still had problems when he organised a trip to Prague with Ebookers. "When my
tickets were lost in the post, it took four months to sort it out. It was a
nightmare," he says. "Speaking to someone was difficult, and it wasn't until we
threatened court action that Ebookers finally issued some new tickets -a week
before we were due to travel."
Although the fault lay with the Royal Mail, Bland feels that a high-street
agent would have reissued tickets much more quickly: "You don't want to be
worrying about refinancing your holiday because of someone else's mistake."
Ebookers emphasised that its online business model offered cheaper travel
because administration costs were lower, but said that, owing to demand, it had
launched a 24-hour hotline to answer queries.
DIY holidaymakers can find themselves high and dry when part of their
package is changed -that's when bookings plunge into stomach-churning disarray.
Douglas Smith, for example, planned to take his wife on a romantic trip to the
Maldives and Dubai. A regular web traveller, he booked with Expedia, and all was
going according to plan until Emirates changed his flight itinerary -a common
practice as airlines try to maxi-mise profits in a competitive world.
Smith tried to rearrange his Maldives accommodation to match his rescheduled
flight, but was told by Expedia that this was impossible; there was, by then, no
availability. "I couldn't get a satisfactory response by phone or e-mail," he
recalls. "I had to cancel the trip and book another holiday -only to be told
that I would have to wait up to three months for a refund from the airline. It
seemed totally inflexible. It ruined a long-planned treat."
Although Expedia apologised, it argued that Smith would have been in the
same situation had he booked with an offline travel agent. The Air Transport
Users Council (AUC) says that airlines are to blame for many problems
encountered online, but considering that they actively encourage online
bookings, shouldn't they be more responsive?
Significantly, Ebookers and Expedia are among Britain's better travel sites,
both scoring 7/10 in a Holiday Which? site test last month, behind only Lunn
Poly, which scored 8/10. Ebookers was also the top-rated British site in the STA
evaluation, ranking fifth in the world.
Poor service is not the only jolt on the internet big dipper. The AUC says
that last year, serious complaints to the council soared by a third compared
with 2002. Lost luggage and delays were the principal sources of
dissatisfaction, but ticketing and reservation complaints surged by 50% -a
development put down to increased online bookings.
It is easy to blame the sites, but the truth is that many booking bungles
are caused by the bored, inattentive, information-overloaded customer. Most
mistakes are simple input errors, made by entering an incorrect return date or
number of passengers, for example.
However, customers blame travel sites for the slow and often clumsy process
of form-filling. Visit the websites of most big ferry companies and try to
organise a Channel crossing -it would be quicker to swim. Although on-screen
design is improving, too many sites still fail to retain input data as you
proceed through the forms, meaning that every time you return to the search
page, you are required to re-enter all your details and dates.
When websites have to quiz dozens of airlines and hotels about availability
and prices, the search can grind to a standstill -and a greater choice only
prolongs this task, as travellers pursue the cheapest deal and best date. "If
you don't have a broadband connection, you can spend hours online, growing
frustrated," says Frances Tuke of Abta. "The internet gives you ownership of
your holiday, but only if you have the time."
Mistakes can be costly, because many tickets are nonrefundable or will incur
a fee if changes are made. This has led the AUC to call for greater tolerance
from airlines. "Customers can make a mistake during the booking process, but
where possible we try to accommodate that -depending on our contracts with
suppliers," says Steven Marriot, Expedia's director of operations. "If a
customer has booked twice, we don't apply any cancellation fee."
Double-booking is a common gaffe, and not all companies are so forgiving.
"People can be impatient and click 'Process' twice, or the site might have gone
down during booking, so they've booked again, then found they have been billed
twice," explains James Fremantle, industry-affairs adviser to the AUC. "There
seems to be very little comeback," he adds. "One common complaint is that if
there is a problem, customers face an expensive phone call to sort it out, and
end up spending as much on the phone as they did on the flights."
It is crucial for travellers to check all the details before submitting
their order: this is the moment when the rollercoaster is suspended at its
highest point in the ride, and one mistake can send your booking flying off the
rails.
Life is certainly more straightforward with organised trips, where set
prices and tours organised offline are in place to protect the consumer. Package
holidays account for a tiny fraction of internet sales, but as more
holidaymakers book online, there are fears that they will find themselves
without protection.
"The big tour operators protect the offline consumer," says Bruce Treloar,
travel specialist at the Trading Standards Institute. "If a company supplying
part of the holiday goes bust, the customer would receive a refund from the
operator.
If, however, a customer has packaged a holiday themselves, they have
effectively become the tour operator, and would have to pursue their case
against the hotel in a foreign court -a nightmare." It is a case of buyer
beware.
Online travel is an immature market.
It fills the role of connecting travellers with suppliers admirably, but
travel sites must radically reform themselves to become as effective as either
established e-commerce sites or the traditional high-street agent.
In the meantime, travellers must hold tight in order to enjoy the ride -and
develop a stomach for thrills and spills. It may well be worth the effort.
"I am a complete online novice," says one satisfied customer, Bill Johnson,
"but I was able to sort out a trouble-free three-month trip around the world
from the privacy of my own home. On arrival in Santiago, for example, I was met
by a friendly, English-speaking Chilean woman with the words: 'You must be Mr
Johnson. Your transport is waiting outside.' Simple."
TIPS FOR THE ONLINE TRAVELLER
1 Take your time when booking online. Print off your confirmation before
pressing "Submit". It is much easier to spot mistakes on paper than on screen.
Retain the confirmation e-mail for your records.
2 If you notice an error after you have confirmed a booking, contact the
site immediately. If you change the tickets before they have been issued, you
might not lose all your money.
3 Pay by credit card if possible. Your card issuer should offer protection
on payments of more than £100.
4 Look for membership of a travel organisation such as Abta or Atol, as
these provide protection for consumers. Check the website for the firm's
telephone number and how much it costs to call.
5 Book early. As a rule, fares go up as the departure date approaches.
LOAD-DATE: May 10, 2004
