We have all come to a point in our evolution as members of our modern lifestyles where we all tend to use e-commerce for almost everything. I do most of my purchases, whether clothing or pharmaceuticals or gardening supplies, online. The other thing we all do online these days is purchase travel and entertainment. Thanks to Amazon Prime and other vehicles like Shop, PayPal and various other enabling payment and fulfillment providers, the process seems to get easier and easier. I must admit that I kinda love the one click fulfillment option where they have my address and credit card on file and I just click and go about my business until things find their way to my doorstep in a matter or hours or days at worst. It all gets a little more complicated with travel and entertainment for several reasons. To begin with, we probably don’t use the many providers anywhere near as often, so there’s the chance that the standard information about us is less current. Then there are the vast array of options involved with things like travel, especially given all the Frequent Flyer mileage and Known Traveler identifiers, not to mention passports and visas, etc., etc.. Some providers have very up-to-date websites that have all the slickest functionality, but others are clunky and get you stuck in some dead end which causes you to have to cancel out and start over, trying hard to avoid that particular bad turn the next time. An added difficulty I am increasingly encountering has to do with the revenue model of various airlines. Paying extra to select seats is a favorite. There is nothing like paying extra for a first class seat and then finding you can’t pre-select a seat until you pay for your ticket, whereupon you discover that the two free seats are taken and you have to pony up an extra few bucks to reserve your first class seat. That was certainly not a pleasant surprise for me. The other thing you get asked incessantly about is buying travel insurance, which I find a particularly bad value and then kick myself about if and when I find I have to change or cancel my plans. But the point is that these are all barriers to getting through a speedy online purchase process. There seems to be nothing like Amazon Prime one-click available on the travel front.
This morning I have been busy booking my “free” found money travel to Hawaii. So far, I have run down every dead end I mentioned above and then some and have finally resorted to calling the airline for assistance. I even went down he perilous route of trying to buy a vacation bundle from the airline that included hotel and rental car. Somewhere in the process it converted me from first class to economy and lured me into such a great deal…only to find the problem and have to cancel with a fee. This prompted me to call the airline, where I was told there was a two plus hour wait and would I like a call back. After doing that dance a few times, I finally got a call from a very efficient young woman agent who is taking me through the process while I type this story. That can tell you quite a bit about how long this is all taking… in total it took just about an hour on the phone with her to finalize everything. Actually, she started off on the right foot by reversing my cancellation fees since she knew I was still interested in the booking. We then went through the flights, the hotel, the rental car and then on to the extras. The easiest extra was the travel insurance, which she was not surprised at all that I declined. My guess is that they are more surprised when someone bites on that option. What I wasn’t really ready for was the list of activities they were also offering. These turn out to be the standard Viator tour packages, but since I knew we wanted to do a few of those things, I opted in. Naturally, opting in was not quite as simple as a yes or no. It’s like choosing the hotel room after you’ve selected the hotel you want. You have to choose the bed configuration and then do you want the city view (probably more appropriately called the parking lot view) or the pool/garden view (sounds like a lot of splashing) or the ocean view. Easy, we’ll take the ocean view, but do you want partial or full? Given the price differential, I decided we could live with a peak at the partial ocean view.
As for the activities, the easy one was the Pearl Harbor USS Arizona tour, which we had learned books up quickly, so that was a must do. But for twice the cost you can include the tour of the Missouri Battleship. Being the big WWII buff that I am, I went full throttle on this one and we will spend 6-7 hours at Pearl Harbor on our first full day in Honolulu. The second activity on offer was the big luau at Waimea Valley. This is a tricky one. It’s billed as a Polynesian Show: Flower lei, Cultural activities, Demonstration, Kava ceremony Luau Dinner at the Waimea Valley Botanical Garden and Waterfall. That all sounds good and is certainly that was something on the to do list (what tourist trip to Hawaii would be complete without a luau?) but they offered a silver seating with 1 drink, gold seating with 2 drinks or VIP seating with 3 drinks (Mai Tai or Aloha Juice). Not being drinkers, I didn’t care about the added alcohol, but that preferred seating lured me in so I guess we’ll be sipping on Aloha Juice just to get the good seats. I booked that for the first night (we get in at midday) but now Kim tells me that its an hour drive away (but wait, we have a rental car reserved with the package…Intermediate SUV), but Waimea Valley turns out to be a little over an hour’s drive from the Outrigger, so I guess on our first night in town we are going to see the whole damn island from our rental car.
Kim is busy looking at what other things we will do on our other two days in Oahu for this little survey getaway. I am sure I did this all in less than perfect or even optimal manner, but in my defense, we did have a wasting asset in the eCredit and I did only have a week or two to use it or lose it, so I feel OK that this little free 5-day excursion that is now costing us about $2,500 is still a reasonably cost-effective way to see somewhere I’ve never been and Kim hasn’t been to in a long, long time. Now that I got through the Booking.Hell program, the rest should be downhill…in a good way.