I’ve been trying to book a weekend away for about a week now and you would think it would just be a case of booking some train tickets to and from the place I want to go to and then book a hotel or B&B room in or around that town. And while it is that easy in theory, I have found it almost impossible in practice.

The problem is that on a number of occasions I have been booking the train tickets or the hotel room and half way through the booking page it has refreshed itself and suddenly the price has double or even tripled.

I know why this has happened, someone had bought my ticket or room while I was half way through paying for it. But what is frustrating is that I remember a time when hotel booking sites and train ticket sites would freeze the price for you for 5-10 minutes while you completed the booking form. Now I am lucky to get 10-20 seconds through it before it refreshes and increases the price!

I don’t know why they don’t do it now, maybe they realised that scrapping this system would help them sell more rooms? After all if you lose the room to someone else a lot of people will just pick the next cheapest one rather than spend time looking for another room at the same price.

So if you are booking a hotel room then get ready to type your details in faster than lightening. I use a browser extension to fill forms in for me and even that wasn’t fast enough!

Photo by Caroline Hoos from FreeImages