The modern artform of booking stuff online comes with its ups and downs.
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Particularly now as we become beholden to the mighty algorithms which sense our desires and manage our search results accordingly.
How many of us, for example, are familiar with the price range of airplane tickets narrowing the more we search for the same thing.
How the number of seats on a particular plane on a particular day to a particular place seem to decline at an anxiety-inducing rate the longer we search online, and not incognito, herding us towards a purchase.
And then how our Facebook feeds become peppered with new offerings next day from similar travel vendors to almost exactly the same locations for prices that didnt seem there the day before, under a different Google sign-in.
Big data has us by the short and curlies and by lord, somethings starting to shake.
The other day, for us, it was our resolve, as we sort to book accommodation for a sombre event that required some urgent mobilisation. It had to be done online because, lord knows, or maybe it was the algorithm (same thing really), you cant talk to anyone in person these days.
Not the real estate agent we were trying to book through anyhow. They kept pointing us to the website as we spoke to them by phone. And when that failed, they started emailing screen shots of the website showing availability of properties, even though they knew where we wanted to stay and the availability, because we were talking to them directly, by phone. Old school.
But therein lay the next fascinating level of booking accommodation these days the modern trend of, wherever possible, not talking to you. Probably because then they might have to tell you stuff.
That was Friday. So we went online and did the business and then sent the person an email Saturday. And thats when they told us by email that the accommodation wed booked on the river with a peaceful and serene view had scaffolding out the front which would remain there for the duration of our stay. It didnt seem so peaceful and serene anymore.
So we rang to express WFT which was futile on two levels: one, they only do stuff online; and two, the real estate agent was closed Saturday and Sunday.
Now I mentioned a sombre event earlier, but it hadnt supposed to be booking accommodation. It was about booking accommodation for a funeral. And we needed it in place now, not Monday.
But here we still had Saturday and Sunday to angst out, with no word from our real estate agent because they were offline, as they explained by email, on Saturday.
So we went back online and hustled new accommodation banking on a refund later, with no guarantee at that stage, and were successful, although the algorithm had us on the edge second time around too because it already knew we were looking.
Talk about getting buried in unnecessary detail.
