You'll need an App for that

I’m not sure if Joe is a real person or a bot. I hope he’s a real person, because if he is a bot, I fear for the future of humanity and the hope that technology will save us.

I started my conversation with Joe when he popped up on the bottom right-hand side of my screen and asked if he could help. I was trying to book a flight. In the old days, you’d walk into a travel agent, deport yourself in a comfortable seat and speak to a lady in a crisp white shirt and colourful neck scarf. After giving her a rough idea about where you wanted to go to, you’d engage in polite conversation about your holiday plans while waiting for a ticket to come out of their dot matrix printer.

But apparently technology has made this better. You can now book from the comfort of your sofa. This started out well. You found the airline’s website, filled out your name and credit card details and it was done.

I don’t want to appear like a grumpy old man, but the truth is that I am. Everything has gone downhill since. It started when they websites wanted personal information they don’t need. If I want to book a flight, why does it matter where I live or what my date of birth is. I guess it stops three-year-olds stealing their Dad’s credit card and plotting a trip to Disneyland. But if they were clever enough to do that, I doubt if they would have entered their actual date of birth.

Then they started upselling. Offering Insurance, car rental and hotel suggestions and making it as difficult to navigate these pages as it is to find your way around IKEA. Then someone came up with the great wheeze of splitting the fare. It used to be taken for granted that you needed a seat on a plane, would quite like to sit next to your partner and to bring a suitcase along on your travels. Somebody, probably Ryanair, realised that if you sell these separately, you could spin the myth that air travel is cheaper than ever, when actually it ends up at the same cost it always was, after you have added on all the items you used to take for granted.

Apart from everything else, this makes booking a flight more complicated than brain surgery, with a similar pain impact. After you have unclicked all the items you never wanted to purchase in the first place, entered more personal information than even your wife knows and committed your credit card details to a website that otherwise filled you with suspicion, you might finally get the “Flight Confirmed” message. Or more often than not a message that would send you back to the first page like a naughty child.

That’s how I ended up talking to Joe. The Auckland to Sydney route is dominated by the national carriers of New Zealand and Australia, who clearly call each other every morning to agree their eye-watering fares.

There is an alternative to this. An Asian interloper that is trying to sneak into this market. We travelled with them at Christmas and they were half the cost of the national airlines. However, my daughter was disgusted that there was no TV screen on the back of the seat in front of her, I was annoyed that my seat that was stuck in the reclined position and left me staring at the ceiling for the whole trip and we were all upset on the return trip when they seated the three of us in random seats throughout the plane.

Nevertheless, I turned to them again last week when I wanted to book another flight to Sydney and saw the eye watering fares that Air New Zealand were quoting. Since Christmas, their website has changed in one key aspect. You now have to set up an Account. You can no longer be a casual traveller, you have to a fully signed up member, willing to accept daily emails and share all of your personal details. They have also enforced two factor authentication. This is normally enforced by banks and government agencies or other parties that need to protect you from fraud. It’s rarely used by websites that simply want to sell you a product.

I went along with the charade. Entered my phone number and pressed the button that promised to send me a text that would finalise my account set up.

The text never arrived and that’s when I started talking to Joe.

“Please uninstall the App and re-install it”

“I’m not using your App, I’m looking at your website”.

“Thank you for your response. Please uninstall the App and re-install it”.

“I’M NOT USING YOUR BLOODY APP”.

At this stage, the conversation changed. Joe passed me onto an anonymous manager who gave me an official case number, as though I’d stumbled into a murder case. His suggestion was that I install their app and try to do a booking through this. I was indignant that technology had got us to the point where an App was needed for a simple transaction but did it anyhow.

The App didn’t work. I still didn’t get a text to finish my account set up.

I gave up and booked a flight with Qantas. It was expensive, but it came with a meal, movies and a bag included in the price, without having to navigate 12 screens.

The cheap airline wasn’t giving up though. They sent another email from a “Do-Not Reply” email address, saying that if I wanted to keep the case open, I should reply to the email.

Two weeks later, I got my final message. It said that they were closing the case and if I wanted it reopened, I should log on to my account, ignoring the fact that my problem was that I couldn’t open an account.

I hanker for the old days and ladies with crisp white shirts.