Journey to the Far North

The pitfalls of Internet bookings

September 19, 2000
Web posted at: 1:52 p.m. EDT (1752 GMT)

By Jack Hamann
Special to CNN.com

Heaven knows, we wanted to use the latest technology.

Putting together a last-minute itinerary on a limited budget for one of America's most popular summer destinations, we were determined to use the Internet to our best advantage.

Often it worked. But sometimes we ended up with small beds, beaters and blank stares.

	RELATED STORY
Bears, bison and baffling behemoths on Kodiak Island

Seward, Alaska, is packed each summer with cruise ships and adventure seekers, so motels fill up fast. Using a major travel Web site, we dutifully filled out all the blanks on a room-availability search engine: There were three of us, all non-smokers, all tall enough to prefer as big a bed as we can get, and $125 was the most we could pay. The site found a match, and we printed our confirmation.

Arriving at the motel office in Seward, the manager shook her head. Someone else walking in with one of those damnable Web reservations! She had somehow received a piece of paper with our last name and the date of our arrival, but noted that it had no mention of the number of people in our party, or any reference to long beds or no smoking. "Lucky for you, you arrived early," she lectured.

A couple days later, we pulled into Kodiak, a reservation for a Budget Rent-A-Car in hand. We had used the Budget Web site to book a car that was big enough to hold three and tough enough to handle Kodiak's gravel roads. Because we had arrived at the ferry dock instead of the airport, we arranged to pick up our rental at Budget's "downtown" office. That office was the cash register at the Port of Call gift shop, a small store buried in a messy jumble of small storefronts in a strip mall a few blocks from the ferry dock.

The young woman at the gift shop had to call the airport to confirm that we had a reservation. "We never hear about it when cars are booked on the Web," she explained. After plenty of time on the phone, she began the big Car Rental Paper Shuffle. None of the information we had entered on Budget's Web site had been passed along to Kodiak, and it all had to be entered painstakingly by hand.

Once everything had been completed in triplicate, we were handed the keys to a real gem of a car: 90,000 miles, broken seats, sagging shocks, rusted doors. (Allison Striegel, Chicago-based spokewoman for Budget, says her company rents only well-maintained vehicles with 35,000 miles or less on the odometer. She apologized for our Kodiak experience and promised to get in touch with the local office.)

During a three-week journey, most of our Internet reservations for tours, transportation and lodging went through with little hassle. Still, we learned a few lessons.

While the Web is a great place to comparison shop and a fine way to make reservations in most locations, it should not be blindly trusted for remote destinations or for bookings during peak periods. When the option could be sleeping in the street, it's still a good idea to phone the motel or rental shop or tour company directly, just to be sure they're expecting you at the time and rate you've been promised on the Internet. Whenever we had a problem, we were greatly aided by the printed-out copies of our Web reservations.

If you'd like to ask Jack Hamann a question about his trip, send him an email at cnnjack@aol.com

Driving Directions
Currency Converter

Umbrella site for travel to Alaska and Western Canada
Kodiak Island driving tour
100 things to do on Kodiak Island
Kodiak Launch Complex
Kodiak Island Convention and Visitors Bureau
National Marine Mammal Laboratory

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.