Saturday 8 March 2014

Travel Planning – car rental and accommodation websites




I have been deep in the throes of planning a trip to Europe later in the year and just felt the need to vent a little about some things that bug me.  I hope you don't mind!  Your thoughts on these issues would be most welcome.
My first wee rant is about why car rental companies won't let you select the model/make of car you want to drive.  There is one major brand that will let you do this – on more expensive cars – and they are at the premium end of the market anyway.  Surely with today's technology they should be able to monitor the movement of their cars and be able to give you a choice of the ones they know to be available at that location on that date??  Why do we consumers put up with it.

And it is also annoying when you rent a compact car (best for narrow French backroads) and they announce that you have been 'upgraded' to some enormous car – sure it doesn't cost more in the hire charge but it is not as convenient to drive and costs you more in fuel.  Next time this happens to us we have decided to refuse the 'upgrade' and see what happens.  My guess is that they have just got their vehicle mix wrong and have run out of compact models.
Enough of that topic – the next one is the details – or rather lack of details – on accommodation websites.  Hotel websites are the worst – the photos in the photo gallery are almost always not labelled so you don't know which sort of room is which.  And even traveller photos on Tripadvisor are rarely captioned in a helpful way.  There are never enough photos to show you what the bathrooms/wc are really like or what the wardrobe is like.  And selecting the right room type is a nightmare.  You just feel like you are taking pot luck.

Why can't hotels provide detailed floor plans of their room layout and let you reserve the actual room you decide you want?  Maybe someone in the industry can explain why this is not done….
Perhaps Google Maps could extend their street view to videoing the interior of hotels – that would make choosing rooms so much easier.

Enough ranting for today.  Ciao!

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1 comment:

Your comments are most welcome. I have currently disabled anonymous comments due to unwanted spam. Cheers