Just Because I'm Neurotic .....

The reception of the Sarova Stanley Hotel in Nairobi
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I (Dave) was in the process last Saturday of getting all our documentation together for the trip and decided to check on the www.ebookers web site to see if there was any updated information on our hotel bookings.

I couldn't log on to the account but being incredibly laid back and relaxed about these things I wanged an e-mail off to ebookers help desk flagging up the problem.

eBookers don't use eBookers!

The Sarova Stanley in Nairobi - and not a cloud in the sky.
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Later the same day, I e-mailed the hotel we're going to stay at in Nairobi (the Sarova Stanley) to ask about the best way of getting to the hotel from the airport only to get a reply saying they didn't have our booking.

Suddenly I'm not quite so relaxed!

I decided to phone the ebookers help line to check whether our booking had indeed been made or whether there was a problem with that and our other booking for Cape Town early next year.

Not a good experience! The call went through to a call centre in India (I know because I had to e-mail them) and not only could they not find our bookings, they couldn't even find a record of us ever having been in touch with them.

The room eBookers couldn't find.
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After numerous conversations and exchanges of e-mails, the official version from ebookers is that if you only book accommodation through them (i.e. no flights), then they use Octopus Travel to do the accommodation bookings and that this was why they had no record of them and why I couldn't log on to an on-line account.

Apart from the fact that it would have been nice if their help desk knew about this and checked it out before putting customers through the wringer, I don't think that explanation quite stacks up for all sorts of reasons. Not least is that when we made the booking, we went into an on-line ebookers account to print out the vouchers we have to give to the two hotels. If we hadn't, then we would have had no record of having made the bookings and ebookers would have been unable to do anything about it because they couldn't find our records.

It's all sorted now but the morale of the story seems to be - always print information off at the time you make a booking on-line. If you rely on being able to find things electronically at a third party web site later, you may have problems(particularly if you are booking with ebookers).

Finally though, an honourable mention for the staff at the Sarova Stanley Hotel in Nairobi. Whilst I was trying to get things sorted out with ebookers at this end, they went away and did some checking at their end and were able to confirm that although they did not have our names, they did have a booking for us with the correct reference number. In the end, they were able to reassure us that we have somewhere to stay a whole day before the people we made the booking through!

And they are going to pick us up at the airport.