Rage, or musings on why Orbitz hates me
I've been on the phone with Orbitz customer services for almost an hour now. This isn't the largest amount of my time that has ever been wasted by a big company but it is without a doubt one of the most unpleasant.
Anticipating that I might need to cancel my ticket, I took advantage of the Orbitz Airline Ticket Protector. This is a service that they promote heavily as a benefit of shopping with Orbitz, as a way that they are different from the competition.
But today, when I called to cancel my ticket, I was directed to call an insurance company that I'd never heard of. I was a little confused but did what they said. I then learned that the Airline Ticket Protector is only good if there is a disaster, death, etc.
I called Orbitz back to complain that they don't make this very clear on their web site.
A quick note about calling Orbitz. Like many automated customer services systems, getting to talk to a real person is a little game. My first strategy is to repeatedly press 0. Sometimes this works. In this case it doesn't. The Orbitz system is voice activated and interprets 0 as needing help with your password. I tried saying "Help" but that didn't work. I tried "Operator." No luck. Then I tried "Customer Service" and that did the trick.
As soon as someone got on the line I asked to speak to a supervisor and from there the call degenerated. I explained that I understood that I failed to read the terms and conditions but that I felt that Orbitz promotes their fare protector in such a way that gave me the false impression that it could be used to cancel the ticket without a catastrophic emergency. I simply asked for some understanding and to talk to someone who could weigh my position and possibly grant a slight reduction in the cancellation fee.
Instead, I was condescended to repeatedly. After half an hour of being put on hold with interruptions of rudeness, each worse than the last, I asked to speak to a supervisor, not to seek the discount I originally hoped for but to complain about my treatment. Even this is not within the agent's power.
The man I spoke with from the other side of the world is not at fault here. He is a cog in a machine bent on squeezing every penny. A business structure that has lost site of why they exist: to give value to customers, to make great travel experiences possible.
It's at times like these that I wonder what possesses a service company like Orbitz to make decisions that makes me, the customer, feel small, stupid, and un-cared for. I don't call customer service very often but when I do it is with a problem. At those moments I am not in the best mood. This is normal and it isn't my fault. By not training their customer service representatives to deal effectively with me in this state they make me feel like it is my fault. This isn't nice. I don't like it when people aren't nice to me and thus I don't like Orbitz.
All this talk of emotion might seem odd first. I am, after all, talking about a big company. Why should they care about how I feel when I deal them? I'm just a small nothing, one of a hoard of customer. That attitude, the reluctance to treat me as an emotional creature and instead as a mere wallet carrier, is what makes people hate companies. When I feel hated I will hate back. I hate Orbitz right now. I hate them so much that I'm lashing out in a blog post. This is normal human behavior. These are predictable preventable reactions.
I would have thought that the least a company could do is apologize that I misunderstood the terms and offer a small token in sympathy. Apparently, that isn't the least they could do.
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