How Orbitz Saved Me a Thousand Dollars

Photo by "innpro" at stock.xchng.

This year, my family and I are spending Thanksgiving with my in-laws in Mobile, AL. As such, one of the items on my tasks list today was “Book flights to MOB.” I started the process the way I normally do by log in in to orbitz.com. This is the site I use for corporate travel, so I have all my frequent traveler numbers and credit card on file. It’s just easier to always go to the same site for leisure as well.

It started off pretty well. I found some tickets for the appropriate days for around $315 each. Not bad. One downside was that the return flight was from Pensacola, FL rather than Mobile, but I was going to be OK with that. I picked my flights and clicked to select. The site pondered this request for a while and then refreshed the page with the following message:

We’re sorry, due to high travel demand, we’re unable to confirm your selection with the airline. Please make another selection. (Message 1048)

That’s too bad. Let’s try again. All of a sudden the price had gone up a few dollars and I still was not able to secure the tickets (same fun message). That’s when I took a closer look at the airline and realized that it was Northwest Airlines. Hmmm, I have points with Northwest. Wonder how many…? I decided to leave orbitz.com and go to Northwest’s site to book the tickets. Regardless of points, they should at least be able to confirm their own flights.

I was happily surprised to realize that I had 126,000 points. Seemed like a lot. However, I had no idea how many points were required for three tickets from Milwaukee to Mobile. I figured the best way to find out was to start going through the reservation process. For some weird reason, I had to log in again, but it was worth it. I ended up finding better flights, which both arrive in and depart from Mobile. 120,000 points required. Sweet!

Thanks to a frustrating experience on orbitz.com, I actually ended up saving $1,000 by going to nwa.com to book award travel.

Moral of the story: Don’t let a frustrating user experience drive potentials to a different company. The user experience starts with the discovery and sales process. Is your product or service easy to discover and buy? If not, this is a great place to start improving the overall user experience.