Just spent two hours (!) booking trains and intermediary hotels for a work trip to the UK in March.
For some reason, the usually reliable Deutsche Bahn were unwilling to sell me any tickets for the journeys required, which usually means they’re waiting to release them due to e.g. track maintenance or timetable adjustments. However SNCB (the Belgian railways, basically) were happy to sell me tickets and reservations for everything I needed? So fuck knows what that was all about.
As to hotels, good grief. For starters, it seems like over half the hotels in Europe are owned or managed by one uber-chain—you know which one—and the dark patterns of their booking systems are shamelessly grifty, like being shaken down by an obsequious but greedy bell-hop who you can’t help but feel will not only insist on a tip but also rifle your bags when your back’s turned.
But as bad as that experience may be, it’s preferable to the mall-from-hell that is b**kings.com, which not only reliably offers you rates higher than the hotel’s direct prices while claiming that they’re offering you a bargain, but does so in a UI “experience” which genuinely makes me hanker for the days when arranging international travel meant going and speaking to a human being in the physical office of a travel agency. Sure, they were on commission—but they competed for that commission by the apparently archaic means of being informative, helpful and trustworthy.
This is a fallen world. The idea of going the full Wittgenstein becomes more appealing every damned day.
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