Blog homeA couple of stories have hit the IT press recently in the UK…… relating to travel websites and issues that they have been experiencing.
This week there have been problems reported by MyTravel. As The Register have reported:
Thomas Cook sister company MyTravel has been hit by a system upgrade blunder which has knocked out a number of its group websites over the past few days.
It would appear that MyTravel attempted to quietly roll out an update to its servers last weekend.
The cheap package holiday firm sent an email to its customers on Monday admitting that a “code release” had caused a major issue with its backend booking system.
It said: “The problem has been identified and is being worked on as we speak. We hope to have the sites and booking functionality back up and running over the next few hours.”
But more than 72 hours after that email was issued to customers, MyTravel is still having problems with some of its web servers.
Read full article from The Register
While 4 weeks ago Vnunet reported about an issue with Travelodge hotel chain exposing credit card details:
A glitch on the web site of hotel chain Travelodge led to names, addresses and parts of credit card numbers being accessible to other customers.
One affected site user claimed thousands of records could have been exposed. But Travelodge said that only a small proportion could have been accessed in the time that it took to fix the fault.
“It appeared my booking information was accessible to anyone on the internet, and I could access others’ details,” the customer told Computing.
Read full article from Vnunet.com
Computing, in their article, reported:
The customer was able to access 19 other people’s information in the same way. And a hacking program, designed to see how many records it would be possible to see, gave an estimated answer of thousands.
Obviously this isn’t what the companies involved intended (the problems, and the press coverage).
Where are the travel industry press?
Interesting though that the mainstream IT press picked up on all of this - but the travel industry press haven’t published at all. Why is that? I believe it is time for the UK travel technology and travel industry press to become a bit more critical. There are far too many “softball” questions in interviews and simple press release republishing. Come on - get tough!
For example, the question I would have asked Travelodge if I was working for the trade press - is if Travelodge knew about the credit card security issue before the customer told them (which is what their statement said) - then why didn’t they take their booking engine offline until it was fixed? (which is the only sensible action to take in a scenario where credit card numbers are leaking).
Was it because 80% of their total bookings go through their website? Was booking revenue put before customer data security? (Source: Computer Weekly)
Come on travel industry journalists - please ask these questions - because us blogger’s can’t - because we are small fish in a big sea - and could soon run out of business if we ask these questions (we can’t upset every potential client!).
(Yeah I know I have upset MyTravel, Travelodge and the entire travel industry press in one blog post - that must be a record! It could have been worse - I could have mentioned by name the two technology providers involved!)
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Fair points - I thought Travelodge were getting off lightly too when I read about it first time.
I also get the occasional irritation with some of the reporting in the travel press. Not picking on anyone in particular, but the most recent example came from a news story in the Travel Weekly last week about Exodus ending local payments for 2008.
Now, I like what Exodus do, and we run some similar style holidays ourselves. However, the report was really just an advert for Exodus, with a brief few lines about local payments, and the majority just listing new tour names and prices. There was no reportage about the issue of local payments at all, though admittedly perhaps it was just the wrong section of the magazine (operator news).
We have always refused to add local payments to our tours, and even when we ran overland expeditions similar to Exodus, tried to keep them to a minimum so that we could be clear to our customers what the tour cost was, and as a small company, to encourage travel agents to work with us.
In my opinion & experience, the main reasons operators use local payments, is to a) hide the true cost of the holiday from customers in their advertising, and b) to minimise the commission payments they have to pay to travel agents. Unless you’re running overland expeditions which by their nature do work differently, I feel saying you need to make a local payment to cover local operating costs is just a cop out - you’re transferring money to that country to pay for the rest of the holiday, so its really not that big a stretch to send enough to pay for everything.
I would have thought that an issue like local payments, that affects travel agents and customers directly, would be something Travel Weekly would making a point of writing about and arguing against (perhaps I missed that article). They could have used the story they did write to give more credit to Exodus for what they’re doing, and advise their agents to encourage other companies to follow suit. Instead, it just read like an advert.
Anyway, full marks to Exodus for starting to be more honest with their pricing - the more that do the same, the better for customers, operators and agents as far as I’m concerned.
(reading back, have gone off topic a little - perhaps I should have posted this on TravelRants!)
many thanks Alex for your sweeping generalisation.
alas, i only became away of this yesterday afternoon, from someone at the travolution conference in london. Travolution is a one-man-band on the editorial side (i.e. me) and therefore following up on every nugget of information is rather difficult - especially while chairing a conference.
i obviously can’t speak for my counterparts in the press with considerable more staff than travolution.
as far as being critical of the industry, i hope that travolution is seen by its readers (and newly found critics) as taking an objective look at a wide range of issues.
earlier this year we do not hesitate in publishing a highly critical piece of analysis on what was at the time the darling of Travel 2.0, WAYN.
probably sounding a bit too defensive here…