For at least a couple of years now, Expedia has been one of the first places I would turn to for booking my travel arrangements. In the past, I've always found them both efficient and competitively priced.
However, this morning, we tried to book a flight, and right at the end of the booking process, the website said that it couldn't complete the transaction because of a technical error and we'd have to phone their customer service centre.
Fair enough, I thought, no-one has a website that works 100% of the time. But when we tried to make the booking over the phone, they told us they would have to charge a 10 surcharge for booking on the phone. Pretty outrageous given that we were only phoning in the first place because their website crashed. Needless to say, we booked that particular flight elsewhere. I even emailed their customer service department and just got a factual reply saying "We charge a 10.00 per person service fee on flight only reservations made with our Customer Services team". No apology for trying to charge for something that was their fault in the first place.
Was this just an unlucky one-off, or have Expedia met the same fate of all those other wonderful companies that started small and were wonderful and then got big and crap?
Adam