Web Whine Lines Grow in Popularity, but Snail Mail Still Gets Better Results

Call it the World Wide Whine.

Fed up with lousy service, operational snafus and misleading marketing, disgruntled travelers are flooding the World Wide Web with complaints. Once confined primarily to Internet mailing lists and newsgroups, their gripes are popping up on a burgeoning variety of Web sites, from home-grown efforts designed to “diss” an individual airline to slick e-commerce operations that promise to help resolve vacation disputes--for a fee.

Even the feds are joining the fray. Last month, the inspector general’s office at the Department of Transportation launched a special site (https://www.oig.dot.gov) that lets airline passengers lodge complaints about overbooked flights and problems associated with landing the lowest fare. The site links users to forms that can be filled out electronically; although the complaints won’t be investigated or forwarded to carriers, Congress will use the resulting data to help evaluate the need for passenger rights legislation and to monitor the effectiveness of the airlines’ new “customer service commitment” plans.

If volume is any indication, online whines are having an impact. Last year, the DOT logged more than twice as many complaints about domestic airlines as it did in 1998--and about a quarter of those 17,381 missives were filed by e-mail at the department’s airconsumer@ost.dot.gov.

There are also third-party sites such as PassengerRights (https://www.passengerrights.com) that accept e-mailed complaints. PassengerRights, a free service that also plugs subscriptions to a travel newsletter, provides online forms and promises to forward consumers’ problems to the appropriate government agency or travel supplier.

E-mailed travel complaints can be a big advantage over other forms of communication because they’re instantaneous and real-time, says Henry Harteveldt, a senior travel analyst at Forrester Research, a technology research company.

But Harteveldt notes that some complaint sites ask for detailed personal information that they turn around and use to sell advertising, and he cautions consumers about fee-based services that offer to intervene on travelers’ behalf. (Among the latter: consumer advocate David Horowitz’s Fight Back, https://www.fightback.com, which charges $30 for “David’s personal letter” and a follow-up letter, if necessary.)

“In most cases, consumers are wise to file their complaints directly with the supplier and copy to the Department of Transportation,” Harteveldt says. “If you’re not able to get any satisfaction, then and only then should you consider using an ombudsman.”

What’s more, e-mailed gripes still aren’t taken as seriously as their faxed or snail-mailed counterparts--particularly those that are dashed off in the heat of the moment. That’s according to David Kirby, editor of an online travel newsletter and regular contributor to the aptly named site Ticked.com, the Ticked-Off Traveler (https://www.ticked.com).

“My feeling is that, particularly when it comes to ‘formal’ exchanges, people pay more attention to written documents than they do to e-mail comments,” Kirby says. “Large companies such as airlines have formalized systems set up for handling and responding to written complaints and requests.

“If my experience sending e-mail to many types of Web sites is any indication, companies do not yet have in place the systems necessary to handle e-mail complaints. Quite often my comments are answered by an obviously junior staffer, [and] more often than not, I hear nothing in return.”

But for many unhappy campers (and cruisers and fliers), venting publicly through such forums as bitchaboutit.com (https://www.bitchaboutit.com) provides its own reward.

Besides, there’s always the satisfaction of discovering that one’s own botched journey could have been worse. PassengerRights even publishes a “horror story of the week”--with the suppliers’ names removed to protect the guilty.

Electronic Explorer appears monthly. Comments are welcome at lsbly@aol.com