07/22/2012 12:53 #56633
Portland ArchitectureCategory: portland
07/20/2012 22:18 #56630
Rat or Squirrel or Mini DeerCategory: animals
07/20/2012 11:21 #56629
Dear Expedia.com - You lost a customerCategory: web
The strangest situation last night. I was trying to book a hotel in downtown portland for tonight. I looked at the downtown map area. Then I accidentally clicked on another map call "downtown portand - south waterfront". Then I prompted me to login, session timeout when I forgot the pass, etc so I used the back button to go back to the downtown map when I checked out but ended up with a South Waterfront area hotel which is out of the city. It would be like staying in Lackawanna in you were going to Buffalo.
I immediately called expedia to resolve the issue. I was cut off twice during transfer. Then they realized the corp office was closed until "5am eastern time" so I waited up and called again. Another cut off during transfer. I called back and got to a supervisor. The supervisor told me she couldn't do anything without corporate and they open 5am central time. I explain it is already 5am central time and we have an argument about time zones. She is in the phillipines and clearly does no understand american time zones. Then she says to call back in the morning.
So I call back this morning 7am pacific time and Lakisha at corporate in Vegas reviews my session and insists it was south waterfront. I explained that I think the issue was caused by using the back button. We argue about it and she says there is nothing she can do, I am stuck with it because otherwise expedia would have to eat the full cost. Clearly, expedia would not have to eat the whole cost because they must be making some profit and I was willing to pay more to be in the area I wanted and believed I was selecting.
I then explained to her that if she did not resolve this I was never using their service again, so the $200 lost would be much less than the entire of my future business by a large magnitude.
She said there was nothing she could do. It seems so stupid to me that they would have such bad customer relationship management. I didn't even want to cancel, I just wanted a room within the area, I was under the impression I was choosing and I was willing to pay more.
Maybe they should redesign their software so that the map is explicitly shown on checkout instead of just the name. The terms "Downtown Portand" vs "Downtown Portland - South Waterfront" look too similar when you were looking at both and though you had backed up to the first one, especially with all of the forgotten password, session timeout bullshit.
I am also going to make it a point to tell everyone I know about this terrible customer service experience from being hung up on several times to the way I was treated by Lakisha. I guess I will checkout priceline in the future. Looking at it now there site seems a lot nicer. Expedias seems real 2003.
07/19/2012 13:20 #56627
Voodoo Donuts in PortlandCategory: food
So Portland has the donut shop where people line up practically around the block 24/7 to get donuts. At 2am last night I thought it was a good idea to try them. I got three and ate the mass of 1/2 of one. I am really not a baked sweets kind of guy but they were delicious. The best one I got was maple frosted with two full slices of bacon on top.
07/19/2012 04:11 #56626
Pooped on th wall?Category: poop
I am at a semi fancy straight dance bar and someone pooped on the wall in the bathroom. For realz. WTF?
What do you expect from a company that was started by Microsoft?
Personally I think you're better off with Kayak or Hotels.com if you want to look at all that is available in an area. Although I do like to play the hotwire & Priceline mystery grab bag game. Doing the research on the sites and forums where people post what may be the hotel given the location & star rating to me seems like a fun challenge & game.
Remember the whole European Volcano fiasco a couple years back? Well Expedia screwed me out of $300 because of their sheer incompetence.
I never used my account ever again. I agree. Priceline is better - but not by much. I sometime use Orbitz for hotels but they are not so great either. Interestingly I have used Google Maps/travel to book better hotels at way better prices by directly calling the hotels and mentioning that I found them on Google maps.