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One of the things that baffles me most about the travel industry is how useless so much of the IT underpinning it is. Hotel chains, airlines and third party booking sites all spend vast sums on adverts encouraging travellers to book through them, but then often make it weirdly difficult to actually do so.
The Accor Hotels (Sofitel, Novotel, Ibis, etc) website is so difficult to navigate and has so many bugs that I’ve entirely given up booking direct with them. That’s despite the fact my account shows that I still have Platinum status until… 2017???
You could write a (lengthy) book on Marriott’s myriad IT issues following the SPG integration. Singapore Airlines – renowned for its great service standards – has a website that is frankly unusable unless you have at least an hour to waste. Etc, etc, etc.
You may find it surprising, but the relatively small Radisson Rewards programme (Radisson Blu, Park Plaza, Park Inn, etc) has boasted a pretty good, intuitive, website for years. It was quick and easy to see all the different rates available for a particular hotel, including Points and Points+Cash rates, all in one place.
It may not have been the most beautiful website in the world, but it looked fine – and far more importantly, it made it easy to find the information you wanted.
Naturally, this wasn’t something that could be allowed to continue.
Radisson Rewards has launched a new, better looking, website. It also happens to be slower, far less intuitive, and just plain terrible.
I’ll genuinely send a (small!) prize to whoever can first explain to me in the comments how to make a points booking using the new site.
I’ve been trying for 25 minutes now and I’ve had enough…
to book using points, log into the account, select “Only Points” under “See Prices in Currency” tab
We have a winner! – Many thanks Terence. To arrange the prize, is it ok if I contact you using the email address you entered when you commented?
hi Joe, sure, that’s fine
hi Joe, just to check if you had tried to reach out to me on email ? Just wondering in case I had inadvertently missed out an email from you. thanks !
Apologies for the delay! – was on my ‘to do’ list so I hadn’t forgotten. Will email you right now 🙂
I think the key is to have a clear idea where you want to stay…so you will perhaps need to use the great map from travel is free to decide that. Then put your dates in, the hotel and you have a variety of options (hilton style). Decide which type of room you want, log in and book it. Good luck!
Thanks Donna! – I was able to get the general search to work (slowly) but couldn’t see the option for pay with points until Terence explained where it was. (Also completely agree – Travel Is Free is awesome!).
There are some truly terrible airline and OTA websites out there. I’ve spent a ridiculous amounts of time on the Singapore Airlines website trying to make Krisflyer points bookings. Why does searching for availability have to be so hard? The website insists on defaulting my departure point to London which I don’t want and always removes the information on destination, dates and class that I’ve already entered. It throws me out after several searches and often simply doesn’t work. Even BA does it better! At least the BA website is usable. It takes a while but you can get something eventually. The SQ site is a disgrace, It’s almost as if they were trying to prevent you making a booking. When you see what an amateur can do in his spare time, https://rewardflightfinder.com/ it makes you wonder what’s going on with the airlines IT departments. Is there another website that I can use to display Singapore Airlines award availability in a usable fashion, preferably a month at a time? United isn’t bad but obviously doesn’t show much SQ premium class availability.
Ha – yeah, the Singapore Airlines website is possibly the lowest of the low. What makes it even more annoying is that there isn’t really an alternative, because so much of the space isn’t released to partner airlines. It’s got a bit better these days as you don’t have to search day by day anymore, but it’s still appalling.
And great point re rewardflightfinder – I just don’t understand how massive companies can fail so consistently at something which you would think is quite an important aspect of their business and really isn’t that hard to do properly. I’ll cut Marriott some slack as the integration with SPG was a legitimately big task, but airlines that make it hard to book flights and hotel chains that make it hard to book rooms are truly baffling.