I’ve used my personal email address since the mid-2000s. It may have been when Gmail was invitation-only or shortly after. Regardless, I’ve had it for a while.
One of the great things about being a relatively early user was I was able to get the exact email address that I wanted without having to add any numbers or a use a different order or anything like that. The annoying thing about it is that has apparently made it easy for other people with similar email addresses to enter my email address by mistake when signing up for things.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten emails addressed to Betty.
Not the worst thing in the world. It’s easy enough to hit delete, unsubscribe and/or report junk if it’s clearly spam or a scam. When it seems legit, I do try to reach out to customer service to report the mix-up.
The latest one, though, hit a little closer to home. For work trips, I book through my company’s travel portal. For personal travel, my family and I book directly — no, please, hold your applause. So, imagine my surprise when I got an email welcoming me as a new rewards member for an online travel agency.
It wasn’t Betty this time but William. It definitely wasn’t spam as I also received an email confirming an upcoming trip. I assume he set up his account accidentally entering my email address instead of his own, and I’m not sure which one he is when I search his name.
So, next best thing is to reach out to the OTA. Every avenue I searched for to reach customer service routed me to a chatbot.
I was less than confident in a chatbot handling the situation. It felt a little too complicated a situation for an AI to handle, but who knows, maybe I was wrong. Besides, if that's how the company wants to handle these situations, well, let's see how it goes.
The first time went pretty smoothly. I answered a couple of prompts and was connected with a live agent within a minute or two. I explained the situation and was told they would put a note in the account, potentially try to reach out to him and/or he would contact them since he wasn’t receiving any of the emails.
Some time passed, and I was still receiving marketing and membership emails from the OTA every couple of days.
I reached out via chatbot again on Tuesday. I explained the situation again to the live agent who told me they created a note for it and would reach out to me in 72 hours. I asked for an email or phone number to call in case I wasn’t contacted, but I was told the OTA would reach out to me when this was resolved.
Less than a day later, I received an email actually addressed to me letting me know my account was at risk for unauthorized access and was told I could reset my password to protect my account. Not only did that not fix the situation, it highlighted the fact that I could fully take over this person’s account and access whatever personal information he has in there.
I reached out a third time. I got a similar response but this time was given a case number. I again asked for a phone number but did not receive one.
I received an email later that evening from the OTA confirming that my personal email address was created under the OTA account holder, once again solving nothing.
I don’t know whether that counts as the issue being resolved. There’s still technically time left in the 72-hour period, so I’ll wait and see how it goes.
While William is the one who put in the wrong email address, I’m mostly frustrated by the response by the company. I have the ability to completely take over one of their customers’ accounts and it’s taken far longer than it should to fix. Granted, I don’t know what the company is doing internally or how they’re able to contact William to correct his email address — because email alone certainly won’t do it.
I don’t know whether communicating the problem over the phone or through email would have made things any better, but I would have felt more confident in being understood than working with three different live agents over chat.
And William, if you're out there, maybe reach out to your OTA. I think you're missing some emails.
You can reach me at bwroten@hotelnewsnow.com and @HNN_Bryan.
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