EightBlack.

There’s no excuse for this sort of thing.

But first a little context.

As most of you know, I spend a lot of time in the US. Last year, I passed through customs 9 separate times. And the last time I went, I was embroiled in an argument with a United States Immigration & Customs Officer. Although it wasn’t really an argument when one of us has a 9mm strapped to their hip and one of us doesn’t.

It started innocently enough.

The customs officer asked why I came to the US so often. Fair enough I suppose. This is when it pays not to act on any thought that this might be a good time to practice a stand up comedy routine.

The next question was “where is your plane ticket, where are you staying, how long will you be here, why don’t Australians like George W? (ok, I made the last bit up).

It started to go down hill from this point. For me. Not for him.

I thought in this day and age that my answer would have been perfectly logical. It was for me anyway. I politely advised the man with the gun and who looked like he had just shoved his parents through a wood chipper, that because I was still able to stand up right, and because I knew how to use a pc, all of my flight, hotel and car details were tucked safely away inside various computer systems.

It didn’t wash.

So, after 90 agonising minutes in a small room off to the side of the arrivals lounge, where another very officious senior US Immigration Officer (who also wore a gun made me wait and then gave me the sort of lecture any boarding house master would have been proud of), I managed to grovel my way out of the fact that I didn’t have any paperwork with me. I was also given a stern talking to about why, if I was married to an American, did I not have a green card. Anyway.

So back to the whole point of this post in the first place.

In anticipation of my travel to the land of the free this coming Saturday, I decided to actually print off the various confirmations I had online, because I am convinced that the nice customs folk would actually crawl up my bum with a very large toilet brush if I gave them any lip this time.

I logon on to Hilton.com.

For whatever reason, I couldn’t print off the reservation confirmation. So I fill out the contact form on the website. And wait. At least 1 full day. Due to the fact that I have A.D.D (or so people tell me), I call the toll free number. So far so good. Nice lady says sure she she’ll email me the reservation details. Which she did. No drama’s.

Then today, I actually get the response from my initial web enquiry.

I have re-printed it below.

Dear Diamond,

The Hilton Internet Contact Center has recently received your email. We are pleased that you took the time to write us! Please note that when you have a reservation with 2 or more rooms under the same confirmation # you will not be able to pull it up online. Please keep the email we sent you as confirmation.

***DOMESTIC***

If you require further assistance, please dial 1-800-774-1500 and choose one of the following options when prompted by the Voice Response Unit:

* Select option “1″ for help with reservations, cancellations and hotel information.
* Select option “2″ for help with technical issues or questions about one of our Brand websites.

If you are currently outside of the US, please visit http:/www.hilton.com/en/hifeedback/hrwfone.jhtml http://www.hilton.com/en/hi/feedback/hrwfone.jhtml for a list of our Worldwide Reservation Offices and their telephone numbers. Or you may place a toll call to us directly at 972-770-6136.

Best Regards,

Amos
Internet Coordinator
Hilton Internet Contact Center
Hilton Reservations and customer Care
www.hiltonfamily.com

Hilton travel should take you places with more than 3,000 hotels and 500,000
rooms worldwide to serve your travel needs.

I don’t even know why you would write such a silly email. I’m not complaining because as a supposed VIP, I didn’t get the treatment I perhaps should have. Not at all.

This is just lazy. Plain and simple.

Hilton’s CRM systems, their legacy reservations systems, and the loyalty program all know my name. The formatting looked like Russian hackers cobbled the email together. No HTML. No branding. No correlation to Hilton at all. And why on earth can’t I pull up the reservation if it I’ve booked 2 rooms?

If you’re going to make in investment into loyalty systems then do it properly. And don’t forget to give your Customer Service people permission to use their intelligence. After all, a human sort of wrote this email to me.

Might sound silly but one crappy online experience and one email has made me think twice about whether I should continue to use Hilton.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.