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Agents furious over Britannia booking fiasco
Agents were left fuming yesterday after technical problems hit the first day of booking for P&O’s Britannia.
Venting their anger on the industry’s Facebook forum, Travel Gossip, and on P&O Cruise’s own Facebook page, agents complained they had spent hours trying to book cabins for their customers but systems kept crashing.
One agent, Jill Doherty, said her client had ended up booking direct, costing her 1 hour and 30 minutes of wasted time and £575 commission.
Others said they had come in especially early or even on their day off to make the bookings, only to find it was impossible.
"Absolutely raging that P&O system have been down since 8.05am made a big effort to be at my desk to make these bookings," said Karen Brooks.
Steven McLean said he eventually tried the direct customer website and managed to get availability "no problem!!!".
Philip Ashdown commented: "Sorry but is anyone surprised that P&O managed to mess this up. It is what they do….same old same old. Then comes the usual apology."
Mid-morning, P&O Cruises marketing director Christopher Edgington posted a message of apology on the company’s Facebook page.
"Today is the first day that we are taking bookings for our 2015 holidays on Britannia," he said.
"We are really sorry but we are experiencing technical issues with our booking system and it is working rather slowly online as well as in the call centre. We are doing all that we can to get it working and we will update everyone shortly."
Just before midday, he posted another message saying the call centre and website are "now working much better", but added: "The travel agent facing booking engine is still running slowly but be assured we have a full technical team working on it to restore service to our standard levels. I’m so sorry for this disruption."
Finally, at 12.50pm, Edgington said he’d had the "all clear" from the IT department and "all booking options are now working and fully operational".
"I really am so sorry for the disruption this morning, many thanks for your patience," he added.
When asked for additional comment and an explanation today, P&O sent this statement to TravelMole: "The technical issues affected all our booking channels including the website and call centre, however we had a full team who worked to restore the systems as quickly as possible."
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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