While doing some hotel booking during my recent vacation I came across some usability issues which I thought I’d share with everyone as an example of an anti-pattern in interface design.

For this trip we booked a vacation home in La Jolla California using Vacation Rental By Owner (VRBO.com) but we needed a hotel room for the last night before flying out. Enter Expedia.com

My search was pretty simple, a hotel room for 2 adults and 1 child for one night in San Diego. After grinding away for a few seconds, I got back 16 pages of listings. I think “Great – we should have lots to choose from!”… until I started to scroll down the list…

Awesome. On the first page of results there were only 5 listings that did not have the handy little note: This Hotel Cannot Be Booked: Exceeds Max Guests”. So just why the hell am I seeing a listing for a hotel that I can’t book into? And what does “Exceeds Max Guests” mean? Maybe it means it’s fully booked? Nope…

It seems that the “Exceeds Max Guests” is related to the number of beds. So Expedia’s search is smart enough to know that I need more than one bed, but their result viewer is designed to waste their customers time by showing a list of hotels which don’t have appropriate accomodations. As if this was not bad enough, for two of the places they listed as “available”, I went through the whole order process only to get a message at the end of the process that the hotel in question did not actually have any rooms. By this time I was fuming, but also not interested in messing around any more, so I called Expedia

Miraculously they were able to find hotels with availability for 2 adults and one child in seconds. What this tells me is that internally, the Expedia reps have a better, more streamlined interface that does not waste their time, which makes sense because Expedia actually pays for the time of their internal people. However, Expedia feels that they can/should waste their customer’s time with ineffective interfaces which return irrelevant results.

I’ve used Expedia for the last 5 years, and this is the last interaction I will have with them. I’m very fond of this quote from Scott Karp – “In the age of Google design has no margin of error, and there are no stupid users, only inadequate designs”. Bye Bye Expedia – I’ll be back when you stop wasting my time.

And another note on the hotel room they finally did book for me – I specifically requested a non-smoking room, which the Expedia rep (“Lance”) ensured me it would be. Of course, when we get to the hotel, it’s a smoking room, that reeks. Since the hotel was 100% full, we had no option to change rooms. From talking with the very apologetic hotel manager, apparently this kind of bullshit is pretty common when dealing with Expedia.

As I sat in the lobby writing up this post, another person came in with a confirmation from Expedia for the hotel, but the hotel had no record of it, nor a room. I did not find out how that worked out as I had to fetch my wife and son from the pool, but apparently Expedia is working really hard to piss off their customers. Perhaps the age of the “travel agent” is not over, as I’d gladly pay a 5 or 10% fee to someone who could actually ensure that I’d get what I wanted and I would not have to fight with some “customer dis-service” representative simply does not care.