Sometimes I swear things were so much simpler before our lives went digital.
A friend and I recently did a road trip through Victoria and NSW, sometimes staying with friends and family, sometimes not. For three of our five destinations we needed to find commercial accommodation.
I’ve learnt from bitter experience to book ahead. There’s nothing worse than arriving in a strange town and finding no room at the inn for love or money. Especially when you’ve just come down with Covid and have to cancel the overnight stay with friends and either have to drive overnight hundreds of miles back to your starting-point or try and find a motel halfway there, using your smartphone in a moving car while feeling sick, as happened to me a couple of years ago. My psyche is still scarred by the experience, and these days I leave nothing to chance.
For this latest excursion I booked and paid online for three likely places a fortnight in advance. Nevertheless, what with the convenience of several different visitees having to be taken into account, there were a lot of moving parts in the scheduling and it came to pass that I had to change a booking at a cabin/caravan park in Dubbo from one night to the next.
You’d think this would be a simple matter, wouldn’t you? After all, I had a bit over a week to make the change, without penalty.
I’d found the place by filtering according to our needs. (I’ll sleep naked under a sheet with the aircon on while he can’t abide whirring air and will sleep in jarmies under a doona even in a hot stuffy motel room. It doesn’t help that we both snore.) It came up on Booking.com, so that’s where I booked and paid.
In reply I got two emails: a confirmation and a receipt. On the confirmation email I clicked ‘manage booking’, found the calendar and moved the date. Up came ‘check availability’, so I clicked that but nothing happened so I went away with fingers crossed to await confirmation of the new date.
Next day came an email saying they would look into my request. Two days later came an email saying yes, no worries, here’s your new date. It was the same date I booked in the first place! I replied to that email pointing out their mistake and asking them to confirm I was ok for the next night.
Next day there was a phone message from the number given on the booking.com email. The voice addressed me by name and she said if I wanted to change the date I’d have to do so through the Booking.com website. Isn’t that what I’d been doing, by clicking a link to it in their email with their name at the top?
Ah-hah, I thought. I’ll pull a swiftie. I’ll ring up the property directly. No luck. A recorded voice told me it was out of business hours and I could make any changes by – you guessed it – going through their website.
So I clicked on ‘manage booking’ again and gave it another shot. Next day, while out of town showing some overseas visitors round, I saw a notification from that same phone number. I begged their indulgence to check it out because by now I was beginning to worry I might be running out of time to cancel or change my booking without penalty.
The message said the same thing: Annie, you keep emailing us to change the date. You have to do it online. Which is what I thought I’d been doing.
I called that number – through the app, natch – and to my great relief and mild surprise I eventually found a human being to talk to. When she said ‘the problem is you have to make any changes through the website’ I resisted the urge to shout that I had already attempted to do this three times. But she was a nice lady and after half an hour she managed to find my booking, while I sat in the car with the phone to my ear, worrying about my guests who were waiting rather more patiently than I was.
When she finally managed to untangle the digital knot she told me that my new date was NOT available, but that I could have a different, smaller cabin at greater expense. Fine, I’ll take it. I still don’t know whether she was from the property, or the property’s management company or Booking.com, and I didn’t care.
Now I can’t wait for the inevitable survey to arrive so I can give them a piece of my mind.
This article first appeared in The New Norfolk News and Derwent Valley Gazette on 20.9.24. This was the follow-up, published on 18.10.24
In my last column I told how my efforts to slightly change the details of an online booking for a NSW cabin park turned into a digital knot that took countless hours to unravel.
Now I’m back home and even more convinced that things were better in the Good Old Days when all you had to do to arrange travel accommodation was to ring people up.
We stayed at four different cabin parks on that trip and at every stage along the way were pushed into doing everything online.
Gone are the days when motels and caravan parks were run by Mum & Dad teams who got up early to make breakfasts, stayed up to welcome latecomers, took time off in the middle of the day and still managed to answer the phone if you rang at a reasonable hour.
Nowadays such places are run by big chains whose employees keep strictly 9 to 5 hours onsite and don’t like you ringing them up, even in those rare cases where they actually provide a number to call.
The online pestilence starts before you leave home with a barrage of emails saying they got your booking, they got your payment, here’s your receipt, they are looking forward to seeing you soon and have a nice trip.
Somehow they know when you’re on the road and they switch to text. A torrent of texts, in fact. And these mostly just add to the degree of difficulty in getting there. Not to mention wasting a heck of a lot of your time.
The Big4 Tasman Holiday Park at Ballina is a good case in point. They sent us a record nine texts, as follows:
Two days before arrival: ‘Would you like to extend for one night at a special rate?’ No.
The day before arrival came a text asking me to create an account with the company. Why should I do that? No thanks.
It continued: ‘If arriving after 5pm simply reply via txt late arrival. We look forward to welcoming you.’ I didn’t know then what time we’d arrive, so I didn’t reply.
Later that same day, a third text: ‘Dear Anne, your Superior Cabin is now ready for check-in. See you soon!’
The day of arrival we got five texts, the first saying they couldn’t wait to see me, the second enclosing a link to their location on google maps, the third wishing me a safe drive and inviting me to complete the check-in registration (not the actual check-in) and to advise of late arrival.
By then we knew we’d arrive about 7, so I texted ‘late arrival’.
A fourth text invited me to complete the online check-in form and the late arrival form and saying yet again that they looked forward to welcoming us. Huh? I had already advised our late arrival but I completed the forms and soon after that a fifth text arrived, advising that our booking details and boom gate access code were in their after hours safe, and here’s the 4-digit access code.
It was dark when we arrived, but there was enough light to enter the code and retrieve our check-in kit, which contained a key and a site map but no boom gate code. We couldn’t work out how to get in, and finally in a desperate manoeuver we zoomed through in the wake of another vehicle, which had dire consequences when we later tried to drive out.
The cabin wasn’t circled on the map but the number 10 was written on it way up in the corner where the residential sites were. As a result we went to residential site 10, not tourist site 10, and naturally the key wouldn’t open the door. We had to call for help three times on the emergency number to find the right cabin and also to sort out the boom gate business. Turns out that in the dark we’d missed the fine print which said tourism site visitors didn’t need a code to get through the boom gate and could just use the keyring fob.
On the day we left, AFTER we left, we got two further texts. One apologized for the temporary closure of the playground, and a later one read as follows:
‘Anne, thanks for staying at Big4 – we hope you created beautiful moments with us! Remember to leave your key at reception. Can’t wait to see you again soon.’
‘Beautiful moments’? Well, we did get a few laughs out of it, and it is a lovely part of the country.
