It should have been so simple.
I tried this week to book a hotel reservation for someone else. As in, the room would be in another person's name, but I would make the reservation and pay for it.
Should have been simple, right?
This process was anything but simple. I was thwarted on the brand.com site, when I kept getting a "That didn't work! Try again!" message. I tried it while logged in to the loyalty site. Same obstacle. My attempt to chat with the AI assistant on the brand.com site took even more bizarre twists and turns. Spoiler alert: That advice to "try again" was useless.
So, dear reader, I did it: I called the voice channel.
I might need a week to fully recover from that experience.
My booking agent tried to upsell me a premium room type before he even knew what hotel I was trying to book. Then his system went down. Then he had to call me back. Then, once he learned I wanted to pre-pay for the reservation, he put me on hold for 15 minutes and transferred me to ... a seemingly endless hold loop, where the recorded marketing message kept referring me online to make my reservation.
If only booking online had worked, I moaned to myself while I sat on hold, contemplating the Rube Goldberg-esque nature of the situation. IF ONLY.
Miracle of all miracles, about 45 minutes later, we completed the prepaid reservation. My human agent sent me the receipt and ... I never received it. I requested that receipt go to my alternate email address and that required a transfer to another department. Fifteen minutes later, I learned that receipts for prepaid reservations won't show up in my loyalty account; they can only be received via email.
Finally, thank all the gods and goddesses above, we completed the booking. I mean, I think we did. I hope we did. I guess we'll see.
It's no surprise that voice channel bookings aren't a robust area of growth for hotel companies. It's clear that the resources follow the investment — or lack thereof.
And I know that companies chasing profitability and unit growth have to prioritize some lanes of growth, which means deprioritizing others. But wow — this needed to be a lot easier than it was.
In this case, every direct channel I tried — brand.com and its affiliated AI chatbot, plus voice — failed, numerous times. The machines didn't work. The AI bot didn't work. And the humans only worked after about an hour of warmup and a lot of coaching from me.
This situation feels ripe for some commentary on how the industry is investing so much into automation and AI-driven tools that they're neglecting the human element. But it might also point to a general, overall quiet and slow degradation of service levels too, because while the humans did get me over the finish line, I wouldn't call what they gave me efficient help.
Or maybe it's just me, and it was one of those days where nothing was going to go my way.
We'll chalk it up to that ... for now. Email me or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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