Hugely disappointed with Adioso

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Adioso

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  Geewhizz on 01/07/2012 - 14:56

  Add to this the fact that the qantas site has been having difficulties several hours and it really makes we wish I wasn't booking flights anywhere today.

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  m0nkeycheese on 01/07/2012 - 16:11

  Contact the rep, he is on here

  http://www.ozbargain.com.au/user/15328

  • 

    Geewhizz on 01/07/2012 - 16:49

    Perhaps I should - the site is in Beta, after all, so I guess the idea is (supposed to be) that they'd be wanting feedback.

    There's certainly no practical way to contact them through the site if you have an issue you need to deal with straight away.

    EDIT: No way to message him through here either.

    • 

      AdiosoTom on 01/07/2012 - 20:38

      +15

      Hey there,

      I saw your message due to a Google alert I have for mentions of "Adioso".

      I'm really sorry to hear you've had an annoying and costly experience.

      If you contact me directly - [email protected] - we'll be more than happy to work with you to come up with a good solution. Given the trip you've booked is in September, there's plenty of time for us to find other flights that will enable you to take the trip at a reasonable price should you still want to, or contact the airline to make other arrangements.

      As an FYI for yourself and other readers…

      The problem you describe - changes in prices between when they are indexed by Adioso and when you go to make a booking - is something we're deeply aware is one of the biggest problems with the site, and one that pains us very much when it causes people problems like this.

      We've spent the past few months undertaking a complete rebuild of the site's underlying technology, which will enable us to keep all the date more up-to-date and prevent confusing situations like this from arising.

      In the meantime, as you mention, we have a clear warning which we hope will prompt people to go and check that all the fares on a trip are available before going ahead and starting to make bookings, but I guess that's not always enough.

      Regarding your complaint about individual charges for credit card fees, baggage, insurance, etc; we will be introducing a feature that will allow people to see only trips that can be bought as a single ticket from a single airline, which will solve this problem. However, where people choose this, it will mean that trips assembled from different airlines that may be much cheaper - even including additional charges - will not be shown, and more importantly, many trips will not be possible to find at all. The fact is that there are many tradeoffs when it comes to making travel decisions, and whilst we're trying to do whatever we can to give people the options that work best for them, it's not possible to make it perfect for 100% of people 100% of the time.

      Regarding communication: we have a feedback form at the bottom of pretty much every page on the site and messages normally get a response within a few hours even on weekends if it's urgent. We have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, and the profile on the Adioso Twitter page links to the personal Twitter accounts of myself and my co-founder Fenn. We monitor these at all times and will respond quickly if there's an urgent issue.

      Adioso is a project that Fenn and I have spent several years working tirelessly to become something that enables people to have amazing travel experiences that would otherwise not be possible. We still make no money out of it, but we continue working on it because there's still nothing really like it anywhere in the world, and despite the problems, it's still something many people love.

      Be assured we're happy to do whatever we can to fix the problem for you.

      Cheers,
      Tom

• 

  Geewhizz on 02/07/2012 - 08:12

  +1

  Great to see you here Tom and that you're actually intereested enough to care.

  Regarding communication: we have a feedback form at the bottom of pretty much every page on the site and messages normally get a response within a few hours even on weekends if it's urgent. We have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, and the profile on the Adioso Twitter page links to the personal Twitter accounts of myself and my co-founder Fenn. We monitor these at all times and will respond quickly if there's an urgent issue.

  I guess I'm used to dealing with companies that just don't give a rat's … and figured that getting a response to an email 'sometime' in the next week if I'm lucky was simply of no use to me. It's great that you're able to respond so promptly. The price listed for the leg in question is still wrong, so I'll be in touch to let you know so that it can be fixed. Something to consider with future features on the site might be a button whereby site users can notify you of such things perhaps?

  Regarding your complaint about individual charges for credit card fees, baggage, insurance, etc; we will be introducing a feature that will allow people to see only trips that can be bought as a single ticket from a single airline, which will solve this problem. However, where people choose this, it will mean that trips assembled from different airlines that may be much cheaper - even including additional charges - will not be shown, and more importantly, many trips will not be possible to find at all.

  I wonder if it would be possible to build in the option for users to do it either way? I realise this is of course more work to get it up and running, but would simply mean more versatility. I'd considered the multiplication of fees on the flights I was booking, and although it added up, was prepared to pay them based on the fares I had been expecting to be paying. Knowing about the issue beforehand would have been nice though. I suspect there are probably a lot of people out there who are very grateful for the system you have created, just as it is. I was probably just unlucky enough to stumble accross the one fare in the system that was inaccurate- who knows?!

  • 

    AdiosoTom on 02/07/2012 - 12:10

    +1

    Hey there,

    Thanks for the gracious response. I can understand you having little faith in travel companies; the industry is generally pretty poor at dealing with people, which is one of the main ways in which we're trying to be better.

    Please do get in touch directly with the details of your specific case so we can do everything possible to fix it.

    Cheers!
    Tom

• 

  hello007 on 02/07/2012 - 08:49

  +2

  For my ten cents worth I have used Adioso for years and the site is ALWAYS my first point of call for booking Australian domestic and Asian flights.

  I love the 30-day bar graphs showing - across multiple airlines - the cheapest day to fly. This is a feature that airlines would rather customers do not know about. They prefer single day search results and hope that a vast majority of flyers become conditioned to accepting the often higher prices that result from such narrowly focused searches.

  So sites like Adioso expose airlines to tougher price competition which is great for consumers.

  However the very slight downside of this is that the airlines don't want sites like Adioso having direct access to their live price feed information. So the guys at Adioso have created rather brilliant site crawling technology that harvests this data from airline websites.

  This gives a good indication of price levels for those flights but the latest ''crawl'' for data on your particular flight route may have happened several hours earlier and the actual prices may have changed.
  So I always use Adioso to find the trends to isolate the cheapest days to fly and then confirm these prices direct with the airline website before booking.

  In the case of a Jetstar price beat guarantee - Adioso finds me the cheapest days to fly - then Webjet finds the nearest flights on that day to price beat Jetstar - and then I price beat those flights direct with the Jetstar call centre.

  Without Adioso I would struggle to find the cheapest days to fly.

  So thanks very much Tom and Fenn - you are doing fantastic work and please keep improving Adioso well into the future.

  NOTE: I am not associated with Adioso in any way other than as a very long term and VERY SATISFIED user. :-)

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  Magnate on 02/07/2012 - 18:45

  +3

  Thanks Tom and Fenn for what you're doing with Adioso. I've used it on a number of occasions. Whilst it isn't perfect it still remains the best option for comparing prices as it does, and it is much much easier than trying to do it manually.

  Tom I also have to say that I am so impressed by your approach and attitude towards your customers. It must be hard when your blood sweat and tears cops criticism like this (in particular when it is unwarranted), yet here is an example of where you have been able to turn it around into a positive. I really hope this goes big for you and Fenn!

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  AdiosoTom on 02/07/2012 - 20:42

  +2

  Many thanks to @hello007 and @Magnate for the very kind comments.

  It's can be tough work, but it's what we signed up for when we started the journey, and discussion like this - both the support and the criticism - is just what we need to keep us on track.

  I've said it before in deal posts, but I'll say it again now: OzBargain was the first community to understand and show support for what we were doing when we started out in early 2008, and ever since then we've always been made to feel very welcome here.

  If we do ultimately succeed in growing site globally in the way we hope, it will be in no small part thanks to the support of the OB community. I hope we can one day do something to show just how much we appreciate it.

  Many thanks again to everyone.

  Tom

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  Geewhizz on 03/07/2012 - 15:31

  It must be hard when your blood sweat and tears cops criticism like this (in particular when it is unwarranted),

  While I admit that I was feeling very frustrated when I made the original post, I wouldn't necessarily say that it was unwarranted although it could no doubt have been worded differently. The problems I had on the day as stated in the post were very real. Unfortunately for Tom and Fenn it just happened to be on the day the Qantas computers also went into melt down, adding to the problems I was experiencing at the time.

  It's quite evident the amount of hard work that has gone into creating the site and it really is awesome that someone has taken the trouble to help us to beat the airlines in their pricing games.

  Unfortunately problems can arise in any system, and as Tom has explained in response to my email, the problem I encountered (hopefully very rare) can't be easily fixed, but with a new platform they're migrating to in the next week or so, this sort of thing will be a thing of the past.

  Personally, as I mentioned to Tom, I'm super impressed that he has taken the time to address this issue, and so quickly. I told him I was happy to ask for this post to be removed, but he would rather it stayed, so that these sort of issues CAN be publicly discussed.

  That says a lot!

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  voteoften on 03/07/2012 - 22:20

  I totally love LOVE love Adioso. I tell everyone about them.

  One thing that would be really cool is if they could somehow pick up on the booking engine discrepancies. Like how Expedia Ireland is cheaper on a lot of OZ -US fligts.

  • 

    Geewhizz on 04/07/2012 - 07:30

    Maybe you could discuss that with Tom voteoften? He seems very approachable and open to discussing improvements that could be made in their system. Basically, if we tell them about problems that exist he then has something to take to their engineers to show them where improvements can be made.