Pot Luck Revisited

I had to go back and revisit this because the first post on this topic didn't really convey what I was feeling about the whole thing and I gave up on it because we were traveling and I had to use the laptop with the touchy keyboard that jumps you around the page as you type. The choices were to leave that computer alone and wait until I got home to resume posting or have the computer at the bottom of the Penobscot River. Either way, I wouldn't be able to post anything until I got home. (We still have the computer.)

But you just can't imagine my surprise/panic/annoyance (insert just about any word here) when I saw that we were booked into a hotel in Rochester, New York. It's no where near Boston. I know Mark was born in Rochester, England but that still didn't explain why we were booked into a hotel in Rochester, New York. I couldn't find a Rochester, Maine so I wasn't sure where he intended for us to spend the night. It didn't really matter, I was going to have to cancel the hotel in Rochester, New York before we incurred any charges. I did see that there was a Rochester, New Hampshire, but I wasn't sure how close it was to where we were going and I really didn't have time to investigate. But this wasn't the first time that Mark had booked us into a hotel in the wrong city, or the wrong country, or on the wrong night. And I knew he was going to blame the website. Because he is techno savvy and does not make such mistakes. Any such mistake must be attributed to poor website design, lack of usability, and the web designer's lack of skill and good sense.

And I knew that I couldn't mention it. Because if I did, I would find myself in the position of making all future hotel reservations. (I think it's enough that it's my job to make all airline reservations.) But as we were heading back to Boston from Maine, Mark was driving and so it fell to me to make the hotel reservations.

Hotels Tonight listings aren't posted until noon and we needed to return the car to the airport by 11:30. We wanted to be able to check-in to the hotel and have enough time to take the car back. Hotels.com usually has pretty good prices. We wanted to be as close to the city center as possible. My job was to find the balance between affordable and convenient. Wow! They were all expensive! But I finally found one that was !.9 miles from the city center, not too far from the airport and less than $300 per night. Click. Enter credit card details. Bingo. Done. Now to plug the address into the GPS and drive there. We arrived at the address, but couldn't see the hotel entrance. A nice young man tapped on the window to see if we were trying to check into the hotel. "Yes, we are." But upon further discussion and him looking at the Hotels.com confirmation that was displayed on my screen we were able to determine that the hotel I had booked was NOT in Boston, but in nearby Somerville. Near Boston, not IN Boston. Not really convenient to anything. It must be 1.9 miles from the Somerville city center. I'd searched for Boston hotels. How did I come to be in Somerville? I may not be quite as techno-savvy as Mark, but I'm not a novice. Clearly this was the website's fault. Poor design. Badly constructed. Not user-friendly. The designers of these websites should be flogged.