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