Review: Expedia Customer Service
As I embark on this typed adventure into the world of third-party flight vendors, Aya is busy in the internet browser tab next door, doing God knows what. I have not heard from her in 40 minutes, and she may not even be in the customer support chat anymore.
Aya is my 28th customer service representative that I have had the immense displeasure to try and rebook a flight with over the last few days. This carnival of moral error was set about when I had the audacity to do something that, it would seem, no one has done before: change my flight date. Had I understood the consequences of what that decision might mean, I probably would have first consulted my primary care provider to make sure I had no predisposition to psychosis, sudden violence, or other behaviors that Expedia would do its best to ignite.
An abrupt goodbye when my customer service representative, Kevin, disappeared entirely from our hour-long conversation. A brutal loss.
The name Expedia comes from the Latin roots of “ex-” meaning “thoroughly”, “ped” meaning “feet”, and “-ia” as a suffix used in few applications, primarily restricted to names of diseases (malaria; anemia). So for an organization that is “Thoroughly Foot Diseased”, you can’t expect much. Yet in most cases, you will probably get even less than that.
The dozens and dozens of hours I sunk into changing a flight were marked with cute and memorable moments like having to reexplain my intentions to countless incredulous booking agents, receiving contradictory assertions about policies and rules, and being quietly abandoned after waiting for hours on hold. I started to envy the agents who would take my request, ostensibly decide they don’t want to deal with it, and hang up. I may even start using that tactic on clients at my job. Every time it seemed I was covering new ground or getting close to the finish, some insurmountable barrier would appear.
“You can’t change your flight using that flight credit.”
“Yes I can, your supervisor said I can do that.”
“Please hold.”
I learned the ins and outs of both the Expedia customer service phone line and their Virtual Assistant Chatbot. I could now (without looking) recite the exact prompts one receives at the beginning of any Expedia customer service transaction word-for-word. I’m skeptical that this skill will impress people at parties, but it’s worth a shot. I’ve also found that when I ask the person on the other end of the conversation how their day has been, they’re more likely to get further in helping me (but would inevitably fail). I’ve learned that every booking agent seems to think there is a “permanent record” that can store information in for future representatives to smoothly understand my request, but that it is an entirely fictional but shared delusion.
Now I know I shouldn’t be complaining. Having your conscious and temporal experience dragged through the thorny, scorched terrain of customer service is a right of passage. But this experience was one that I would not recommend to even the most Herculean masochist. In one particularly poetic moment, my multi-hour hold with a supervisor was interrupted by another Expedia phone number calling me. When I answered, the calls entered a screeching feedback loop that embodied the screeching discordance echoing throughout my tension headache during this entire rebooking process.
It is a truly respectable feat of mismanagement that a company with $12.07 billion in revenue has created a business-client interaction that is consistently unpleasant for both the employee and the customer. Like a Yin and Yang spiraling through a shared hellscape, I have become accustomed to the various dependencies that the Expedia call center staff are subjected to just as they are subjected to mine. The circumstances conveyed through being on the receiving end of their mangled flight-booking application seems to be something like a dimly lit room, somewhere in Latin America, filled with Windows 95 desktop PCs scattered about. The system does not reflect any real data available on the open internet, and it leads to confusion and frustration for all parties involved. I have only managed to uncover the nuances of what can and can’t be done after speaking to dozens of separate representatives and supervisors, slowly amassing knowledge on airline policies that I never wanted. The booking agents sustain off of any grain of kindness that you throw their way, because the majority of their job is to try and contort a useless computer system to a deluge of angry customer requests. It’s heartbreaking. But it’s that kind of debauched circumstance that really hits home the horror of the experience. The psychosomatic effects of this employee-customer relationship yield two confused people, in near-physical pain, desperately exchanging itinerary numbers back and forth. What just God would allow for this kind of abject misery?
As I sit here, screens glowing into my bedroom walls shaded by midnight, I feel as though there is no hope for humanity. Then suddenly the elevator music blasting through my speaker phone stops, and my 28th customer service representative Chya tells me he just booked my flight successfully. This odyssey of pain is finally over.
I think there’s a lesson in here, hiding under the toil and mire. Life will always have its Ayas, and its Kevins, and its Julios, Javons, Wennies, Serenas, Rachels, Wills, and all the rest. But it will also have its Chyas. And the Chyas will come, it may just take some acts of self-torture to find them.