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Mad As Hell and I'm Not Going to Tech it Anymore
The Travel Technologist · August 9, 2001

What ticks you off about technology when you travel?

Is it those surprise hotel phone surcharges that no one told you about when you checked in? How about your crash-prone computer operating system? Maybe it's your crappy cell phone?

You know. But do you know what your fellow road warriors think? If you're interested - and don't lie to me, I know you are - then skip those statistically meaningless polls and ignore the tidy sound bites delivered by the overpaid analysts in cheap suits. Just click through this column's archives.

A pointless exercise? Not if you want to have a better trip.

This is the only weekly column about travel and technology - online or offline. Nowhere else will you find a more tightly focused or timely feature on the topic. But what you don't see is the other half - the thousands of e-mails that I get from readers. It's these missives that offer a rare glimpse into the soul of the road warrior.

I'm sure the marketing mavens of the world would pay big bucks for these insights, but this week, they're yours for free. Why? Because knowing what travelers don't like about their technology means you can better avoid the hassles and headaches of going places with your gadgets. Or at least try to.

The trouble with cell phones. We love them. We hate them. But mostly, we can't live without them. They're our connection to the outside world, our lifelines, and even our virtual security blankets. It's difficult to exaggerate what cell phones have become to frequent travelers, which may also explain why some of the angriest e-mails I get are about mobile phones. Responding to a recent column on the mysterious nature of roaming fees, reader Donna Baldinger irately denounced the surcharges as "a rip-off." She quickly added that carriers should be allowed to make a profit - but not by being deceptive. "To do things sneaky is not the American way," she wrote. "We are competitive, not underhanded."

Cheryl Brownstein, a consultant from Marco Island, Fla., got a "$500 shock" when AT&T bought out her Cellular One contract recently. "My bill more than quadrupled," she remembers. "That was the last straw."

Solution? She switched to another carrier.

But roaming fees are only part of a much broader problem with wireless devices. In the past, readers have ranted about the lack of cellular connections at airports (we spent two columns on that subject), dropped calls (another two columns), airline crews who disdain wireless callers (three columns, at least) and callers distracted by doing something really important, like driving. And it's no stretch to say that I've written half a dozen columns on motorists and cell phones.

Put differently, a good place to start when you're trying to figure out what travelers love to hate is the cell phone.

The OS mess. Microsoft unveils its eagerly-anticipated Windows XP computer operating system in a few weeks. Meanwhile, Mac users are still trying to figure OS X out and let's face it, the Palm OS could use an update (it might help the company's lackluster earnings, you know). Regardless of how you slice or dice it, the operating systems we use when we travel aren't made for us; they lack many of the basic features that road warriors need and they're scripted by engineers who think they know what travelers want but who rarely darken the door of an aircraft.

"Windows ME sucks," declared reader Kirk Short of Truckee, Calif., in response to a column about whether the Microsoft OS was any good for travelers. (My conclusion: it isn't.) "It is impossible to get any support satisfaction from Microsoft. Its $35 per-incident charge is offensive. It echoes a Dilbert cartoon that says, 'We have a new business plan. We will ship defective products and make our money on tech support.'" (For the record, Microsoft doesn't divulge its income from tech support in its annual report.)

Bad connections. Another annoyance: anything having to do with an Internet connection, from unexpected phone charges to high-speed connections that don't work. It took two columns to get to the bottom of a reprehensible practice of billing business travelers for Internet connection time by the minute. That's a practice that cash-strapped hotels are, if anything, doing more often now. "It's outrageous," quipped reader Deborah Terrill from Eugene, Ore., who managed to rack up more than $400 in phone charges at a Crowne Plaza property in Toronto. She was mostly surfing the Internet.

Ditto for high-speed Internet access. I've lost count of how many articles I've written that have either mentioned high-speed access or have been the sole focus of it. In one, I interviewed John Patrick, an IBM manager who lamented the lack of any reliable connection - let alone a high-speed one.

I never bothered to question the economics of high-speed connections in this column until I heard from Greg Salloum, the general manager for a Best Western property in Kelowna, British Columbia. The reason many hotels don't offer high-speed connections - or ones that don't work right - is that they haven't paid for it. "The system is provided at no charge [to the hotel] so the service company could then profit-share with the hotel - something like a long-term lease," he explained. "I didn't like the idea of being beholden to a lease company, so I bought a high-speed Internet system from a local software provider and gave it away guests as an amenity."

Unlike most of the technology developers, hoteliers and airline executives I cover in this column, Salloum is part of the solution, not the problem.

But problems remain.

While these aren't necessarily the top three technology-related annoyances, it's a safe bet that they're near the top. That's based on nearly four years worth of columns and day-to-day contact with frequent travelers like you. Unless I'm being lied to, I would say that there are a lot of very irritated travelers out there who wish someone would just give them what they want: a cell phone that works, a reliable Internet connection and an OS that doesn't constantly crash.

Is that asking too much?

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Annapolis, Md. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. The Travel Technologist appears weekly on this site. This story was also published on Biztravel.com.