American Express travel web site GRRRR!

[Jennie]

I received an Email invite to participate in a survey about my experience booking an airline ticket yesterday on the American Express travel web site.

After answering and rating several aspects of the experience (1-5), the final question asked for my suggestions re: making improvements to the web site, if any were needed. Here's what I wrote:

"Using the Amex travel website was a "nightmare." Instructions were ambiguous. Checked boxes became unchecked for no logical reason later in the process, almost causing me to submit serious errors.

Navigation using the "back" button did not work at all. And I could find no easy way to modify search data after receiving the initially requested price and schedule info. In other words, if the price or times displayed during an "exact date" flight search were not acceptable, and I wanted to return to the first page and enter new dates, I had a very difficult time doing it. I had to resort to re-accessing the web site using a different browser, log in again, and re-enter all the info. Once the "old" info was still there and I couldn't delete or override it.

The pages loaded very slowly. And just when I thought I had gotten to the final step of booking my flight, I received a message that due to technical problems my reservation could not be completed at this time, or that my session had "timed out." This happened 3 times !!! When I spoke by phone with a technical support rep, he said that he had received no reports of a problem with the site. He offered to stay on the line with me until I could successfully book the ticket. It took a looong time due to the slowness of the site, even on his end!

I am a very experienced web surfer who makes hundreds of reservations on-line. I have never encountered a more frustrating experience that what occurred during my visit yesterday to the Amex site. It took me 2 hours and 3 phone calls to Customer Service to successfully book a simple, straight forward round-trip flight. Were it not for the special 30% Membership Rewards Points discount offer, which I was eventually able to use for this reservation, I would have been long gone to another web site to book it.

I found the whole experience so unacceptable that I was planning to take time out of my too-busy schedule to send a complaint message to Amex. You saved me the trouble of trying to locate their contact info, thank you. I don't know if I'll ever want to visit that web site again. I'm still agitated recalling the whole ordeal.

 

[gorevs9]

I too had similar problems with using their website. I tried to make reservations using two different accounts and both times there were problems. Both times I had to call the travel rep, who in turn called the airline to book the tickets. Both times the cost of the ticket increased and they wanted to charge me the extra fee for an over the phone transaction (which I got them to waive).
To top it off, the rep I could barely understand the rep (I did press "1" for English, but maybe we should change that to press "1" for American.)

At other times, when I deal with Am Express, I get pretty good service, but for travel...... I think they sub-contract out the travel business, so they need to hook up with someone more reliable.