Orbitz, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

The, uh, nice people at Orbitz wrote back:

When booking with any online service you are acting as your own travel agent. It always a good idea, as well as your responsibility to verify all travel information before going. ... In this situation the hotel states the reservation did not go through even though Orbitz shows the electronic transfer of the reservation as successful. The hotels are responsible for managing their inventories and unfortunately this hotel did not.

Since Orbitz is not prepared to recover the cost of the screw-up from the hotel, what am I paying Orbitz for? A few guesses.

1. For a terrible web site. One that forgets who am I even though I check "remember me." One that times out sessions after a few minutes. One that is slow. One that doesn't understand simultaneous sessions. One that can't learn when my default airport has changed. One where the price changes every time I try to buy something. In a fraction of the time, Yahoo has already made them look lime amateurs.
   
2. For obnoxious customer service. Customer service that tells regular customers that they have to pay $50 change fees. Customer service that tells me I should double-check everything they do because they might screw up and leave me without a hotel at my destination. Customer service that tells me I should double-check everything even though the confirmation tells me not to contact the hotel directly. Customer service that thinks it's okay when they land me in Miami with no hotel and can only find me a dreary room at the same price but minus the excellent location, 4 stars, and ktichen of the original (possibly explaining why it was free at the last minute). Customer service that discourages me from speaking to a manager and tells me I should not expect compensation. Customer service that says I must continue my discussion by email and then cuts off the email thread and says I must continue by phone.
   
3. For incurring additional risk. When I book a hotel directly, I can usually cancel without penalty. When I book airfare directly, I usually have 24 hours to cancel. When I book with Orbitz, I'm screwed. With an Orbitz travel package, I pay $50 to cancel the hotel and the airfare is nonrefundable.
   

At the end of the day, I am forced to use Orbitz because they have their special deal with the airlines that lets me search all of their cheapest airfares. Luckily, you can usually save $5 by booking straight with the airline and even get a few miles in the process. Next time, I'm going to start with Travelocity's supposedly pleasant customer service and work my way down.

Any tips on getting some finanically-meaningful apology out of Orbitz? Anybody have any luck with the Better Business Bureau or something?

SoBe

Catherine and I are back from South Beach, which was really fun, except for the part where Orbitz somehow didn't book our hotel and then tried to buy us off with a $50 travel voucher (we'll see how that all shakes out) and my bum foot, which made running a bit tough. We sat on the beach and read and played in the waves and ate Cuban food.

The art deco hotels are awesome. What is it about art deco that is so captivating?

NetFlix brought Harold and Kumar to our mailbox. Very entertaining.

more pics »

Grrr

When I visited Mountain View last week, I decided to stay in San Francisco so I could go out and explore the city. It turns out SF is a dump. Who knew? Especially on the way to my only-thing-left-during-MacWorld hotel, the smell of human feces was overwhelming. The only people on the street were scary, aggressive drug addicts. Also, the last BART leaves SFO before midnight. Silliness! There were good coffee shops in the Mission, at least.

But the worst part about it was that I woke up at 8:11 for a 9 am meeting in Mountain View. The shuttle takes an hour, and the next one was at 8:40. Running to make sure I didn't miss it with a heavy backpack on, I appear to have mangled my foot, which has put a real damper on my running.

Damn you, San Francisco! Whoever says New York is dangerous should try walking anywhere in our sister to the West.

Delta whore, and other stories...

Is it wrong that I'm really excited about my new "medallion" status on Delta? On my trip home, I was upgraded to First Class for free on my trip home. Being a pliant consumer is rewarding.

Speaking of consuming, C and I signed up for Netflix. If you're a user, add me as your friend. I've also started adding friends on Amazon. That all started when I wanted to send Lisa a link to a book and there was a checkbox to make her my friend. I wonder if having ugly URLs was part of their strategy all along?

Although I worship at the altar of capitalism, I of course remain skeptical about religion. This ceremony I went to at home left me wondering about how Hinduism led to all this caste nonsense. Of course, Wikipedia had the answer. Now the question is, is there any religion that hasn't been used to cause harm to others? Maybe Buddhism? Unitarianism? In any case, I read about these interesting anti-religious children's books in the New Yorker - I think I might check 'em out.

Recent choice podcats:

KEXP 5 - who knew that sound engineers even have ouveres to sample?

AGDFA 21 - if you have to listen to Christmas music, it might as well be alternative and rock

If there's any doubt that podcasts help sell music (wait! didn't we already have this argument with radio?), I bought The Magic Numbers album after hearing them on KEXP Live Performances.

Back in action!

I am now a WordPress user, after Richard became convinced that CGI was fundamentally unsecurable. We'll see if this lock-down makes the server any happier, but WP is pretty, anyway.

On an unrelated note, I made a map of the long runs I've started doing. Of course, it doesn't do justice to some of the rough hills.

Random stuff

Simpsons:
Lisa: I hate going to the zoo. I feel so sorry for the animals.
...
Homer: In the wild, they would never experience boredom, obesity, loss of purpose... you know, the American dream.

New Yorker:
"We have to do something about satellite television to keep society free from this horny jerk-off situation."

For those of you using Google Reader, I wrote a Greasemonkey script that lets you open the current item in a new tab.

On the weekend-yuppie-meter, a score of 7

Friday night, dinner at Nam, which had the typical almost-too-much decor of Tribeca, but suprisingly good vegetables in curry and banana bread with ice cream (but bad soup, according to C).

Saturday, went to dia:Beacon. (Tip: buy the discount package from Metro-North machines using the Getaways button in the upper right corner.) Favorites included On Kawara, Agnes Martin, and Fred Sandback. A very cool space. (Good reviews at from the floor and findarticles.)

Along the way had an interesting discussion with Sarah, who works in publishing, about why Google Print might be evil. She explained that they have to buy the right to song titles to put into textbooks, so who are we to even tangentially repurpose and possibly profit from whole pages of books? Compelling, but this really just suggests that this permission crap has gotten out of hand.

Today, unlimited mimosas and coffee at Basso Est, shoe shopping at Jackrabbit Sports, and plate-hanger-buying at Home Depot.

I also started running with my iPod. Running with shuffle and using the free case it comes with is actually pretty workable. So much music at my fingertips... Still hunting for good podcasts. I did get a scary error message from my iPod about not being able to write to the disk, but some people on the Internet attribute it to problems with USB port, which given the weird messages I get about USB 2.0 seems like a possible issue.

Exegesis is up to 27 links on del.icio.us and few mentions in blogs. A plug on kottke helped a bunch. (Thanks!) By the way, two new hidden features: 1) searching for a word that does not occur (e.g. "fags") will highlight verses linked by any pages that match the word and 2) usng the left and right arrow keys in the search box will jump to next and previous search matches.