This week's Travel Insider newsletter brief extracts

The key challenges for online travel companies is that they are selling a generic product to a clientele that has no loyalty but extreme price sensitivity. Doesn't sound like a great business environment to me.
Online travel sites face turbulence - Oct. 3, 2003: "NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - First there was the dot.com bust. Then the nation was at war. Neither scenario, however, damaged the online travel industry's explosive growth and rapid consolidation.
But now industry watchers say the boomtime for the companies and their stocks may be over. "

Customer care - Not!
My love-hate relationship with the internet continues. I was booking a hotel in London through the British discount hotel site lastminute.com earlier in the week. Somehow, their website made a mistake (truly it was not my mistake) and forgot about the arrival and departure dates I'd entered, and instead defaulted to arriving on the same day I was making the booking. This only became apparent after I'd paid for the hotel room with my credit card, on a no changes no refunds type arrangement.

Do you think there was a phone number I could use to then call some sort of customer service person? No, nowhere on the site was there any way to contact a real person. There is no way that anyone would agree to work on this basis with a regular travel agency. So why do we willingly subject ourselves to such ridiculously hostile customer disservice on the internet?

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