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“Shambolic site with useless customer support”

written by UnfortunateHLcustomer on 01/11/2015

The transition to TripAdvisor site has been poorly managed with little communication of the problems. Have spent hours talking to customer services. Someone else said they must employ monkeys but I think that is a cruel slur on monkeys. These guys are simply dire.

They tell us excitedly that they have listened to customers and built a new dash board that is a real improvement. In reality they have taken away so much functionality, limited scope for adding free text other than one single box (you can't highlight text, underline or change any fonts) and made it impossible to edit out-of-date pricing information on the HL site at the moment. The way they scare guests about the risks of not booking on-line is underhand and cheap. Try sending yourself an inquiry and you see the tactics in full. First the guest gets an email signing them up to TripAdvisor and warning them about the risks, urging them to pressure the owner to use their service (where they make lots of cash). They are also presented with other villas in the area, all of which take on-line bookings. Even when guests scroll through your listing photos they come to the end and are teased with other villas.

They ignore on-line inquiries to customer services, just reply with a link to their FAQs. The telephone service averages 20 minutes then you often get someone with a poor grasp of English who promises to fix things in 24 or 48 hours, or to call you back but nothing happens.

Interesting to see if I get the same glib standard response from them that everyone else who has posted gets i.e. thank you for taking the time, sorry to hear about problems, provide more details and happy to investigate for you, blah, blah blah. Go on break away from your scripted reply that must use standard paragraphs and provide an honest and human response. Say you have screwed up and give me a contact number of a person I can talk to (other than that hopeless contact center on another continent) who will stick with me until my problems are resolved. People are watching and will judge you by the quality of your reply. Go on... I dare you.