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Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

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Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#181

Post by lotsofpulp »

INTPenis wrote: post #66
jan_Inkepa wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Booking.com said "talk to the hotel" and the hotel said "talk to booking.com". I got trapped in a loop there as well, it was pretty wretched. Hotel would only except credit card details sent via plaintext emails (on the phone I couldn't reach anyone at the purported hotel, just a call center, where they couldn't deal with processing), nobody would release me from the obligation to pay, neither booking.com nor the h…

> Hotel would only except credit card details sent via plaintext emails This seems very common issue in hotel business. I regularly travel with Amex business travel and our travel agency sends a temporary cc# to the hotel so I don't have to pay for the room. So that's a temporary cc# which is a little safer, but it's e-mailed in cleartext to the hotel regularly for thousands of guests.

It is because the major hotel brands franchise their brands, and want the franchisees to take on all the merchant account risks of chargebacks and whatnot.

Marriott/Hilton/Hyatt/IHG/Choice/Wyndham/etc collect 5% to 20% of top line revenue from the hotel, and do not want to deal with losses from things like chargebacks and whatnot.

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#182

Post by xsist10 »

wraptile wrote: post #158
vondro wrote: post #65

Just skimming through the comments, there is some negative sentiment about Booking.com. So I came to say, that over the years, I've used Booking.com numerous times, without any single problem. Yes, there are dark patterns (13 people are looking at this offer right now, etc.), but free cancellation was always free for me, reviews matched my experience, information matched the reality. Sorry to hear about the layoffs,…

Booking.com is the _lesser_ evil imho. For one it shows total price 99% of the time right there on the search page where alternatives like Agoda show total at the checkout which is heavily inflated. Their loyalty program (Genius) is automatic and simple too where's competitors resort to various coupon and other complex "discounts". I surely hope Booking is not going away.

Booking owns Agoda https://www.bookingholdings.com/brands/agoda/

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#184

Post by ricardobeat »

onion2k wrote: post #3

They're outsourcing their customer services. Thia is actually quite annoying, because the one time I've used their customer services they were really good. I needed to cancel half of a reservation (booked for 2 nights, needed to leave early), and the hotel staff said they couldn't do that as I'd booked through a third party. I called Booking.com and they made it happen. Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continu…

This may be one of the reasons for the uproar. The CS employees far outnumber the rest of the company, and the in-house customer service was one of the moats B.com had against the competition. To have them suddenly transferred to a third party is shocking.

It’s hard to imagine the same level of service can be provided by call centers tending to multiple brands/products at the same time.

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#185

Post by MandieD »

omnibrain wrote: post #53
MandieD wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had a decent 15 years or so of using Expedia (.de and .com, depending on where I was traveling and which credit card I wanted to use). Prices and availability generally in line (maybe slightly higher prices) as Booking.com, without the in-your-face FOMO inducements.

I banned the use of Expedia in our company because they were almost never able to produce a decent invoice (in the name of the company, listing the name of the employee who had the room). Expedia said the hotel has to provide the invoice. The hotel said Expedia has to provide the invoice because we had contract with Expedia. Never such a problem with booking, because with booking the contract always has been directly…

Oh - forgot about that problem and wild goose chase the one time I foolishly tried to save my employer money on a hotel booking. Learned that lesson, never booking outside of miserable Concur for work travel again (should I ever travel for work again).

Personal travel, on the other hand… still an Expedia fan.

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#186

Post by paulcole »

nolok wrote: post #87

Disregarding how horrible it is to do that this way, ... The employee says he's french, so either he didn't have a french work contract, or what he is saying is untrue. While you can transfer an employee from one company to another, it must protect every employee advantage, his history, etc ... So he has the same severance as on his original contract, with the original timeline (his time of employment isn't reset to…

> The employee says he's french, so either he didn't have a french work contract, or what he is saying is untrue.

Or someone ignored the contract? This is like that Top Gear clip. “You can’t do that, there’s a contract!”

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#187

Post by strzibny »

vinay427 wrote: post #98
MandieD wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After spending most of my adult life in Germany, I have to be extra-vigilant when doing anything with money back in the US - from remembering that the prices on the shelves are several percent lower than what I’m actually going to have to pay (while being way lower than VAT, sales tax is not included in prices!) to anything to do with cellphones, and then stuff like this.

On the other hand, after growing up in the US I have to do the same when shopping in Germany or Switzerland. It’s almost unheard of for stores here to offer compensation such as a refund or exchange for many situations commonplace in the US, and many customer service interactions for other things like a phone bill have exhibited stubbornness to arbitrary policies that borders on hostility IMO. I’m not sure sales tax…

No, I think this is about mental exercise. Do I have to go shopping with a calculator to know how much I am spending?

To me personally it's weird. I come to shop with $5 but I don't know what I can actually buy...

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#188

Post by zwaps »

vinay427 wrote: post #153
zwaps wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the EU? For the first 6 months, the legal assumption is that any defect was present at purchase which means - in practice - you can return pretty much any defective item no questions asked. What did you want to return and could not?

> In the EU? Most instances were in Switzerland as I mentioned, although a few were in the EU. Some weren't defective items but rather unneeded items. Returns based on changing one's mind, even if the item is in unused condition and remains re-sellable, seems to not be a "thing" in at least several European countries whereas American consumers typically expect these consumer protections not by law but by convention.…

You have, by law, two weeks to return any item you bought online for any reason whatsoever, and you have 6 months essentially "no questions asked" return for defective items - on top of the actual warranty periods (that, again, are by law).

As far as conventions go, I check some larger retailers from Europe, like Zalando, and they offer a 100 day return policy [1] by convention.

Maybe Switzerland is the outlier here?

[1] https://en.zalando.de/faq/Returns-and-Refunds/About-our-100-...

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#189

Post by golergka »

I can see how this is bad for Booking.com users (quality will likely go down) and current employees.

But it's a good thing for a lot of people from third world countries that Majorel will inevitably hire: what might be a bad salary for this person from France is likely a great deal for the places where this jobs go.

So, from a bystander viewpoint — is this ethically a bad thing? People from poor countries out-competing their counterparts from developed countries? I'm not sure.

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#190

Post by wraptile »

xsist10 wrote: post #182
wraptile wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Booking.com is the _lesser_ evil imho. For one it shows total price 99% of the time right there on the search page where alternatives like Agoda show total at the checkout which is heavily inflated. Their loyalty program (Genius) is automatic and simple too where's competitors resort to various coupon and other complex "discounts". I surely hope Booking is not going away.

Booking owns Agoda https://www.bookingholdings.com/brands/agoda/

wow TIL. It almost feels that the hotel industry is just cancer all the way down.
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