Falling Out of Orbitz
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A lot of online behavior is habitual. My e-mail client is Eudora, for example — an orphaned program that hasn’t been updated since 2006. People keep telling me to switch to this or that but I like Eudora and have 17 years of mail stored in it, though I sense an end coming there. I also use Orbitz, primarily, for my travel planning. And it isn’t that Orbitz is particularly better (though not particularly worse since I use Kayak from time to time to compare) but that it holds already in its digital innards a whole succession of my credit cards as well as my five frequent flier numbers. Or it did.
You see Orbitz has lost my numbers.
Last week I took a flight to Dallas and they were right there on the screen in my user profile — a bunch of credit card numbers dating back to the late 1990s and my frequent flier numbers for American, United, US Airways, Delta, and Northwest. I know those last two have merged but I’m not sure my frequent flier numbers yet reflect that. Frankly I don’t KNOW any of those numbers, relying instead on Orbitz to keep track of them. But then today I went to book a flight to LAX and while the web site knew who I was from the cookie I was carrying, it suddenly had no idea how I paid for tickets or what affinity programs I was with. I only hope it guessed that I prefer windows to aisles — I’ll have to check on that.
Remember last week we discussed in this space how you’d manage personal data following the demise of a photo-sharing or social networking site? Well here’s an analogous problem — how do you manage YOUR data in ANY e-commerce site? And what does it mean if THEY do a lousy job of managing it for you, as Orbitz has done with me?
So I called customer support. When I eventually got through a guy named “Richard” told me my numbers were hosed, though he claimed never to have seen the effect before. Somehow I doubt that. And from his accent I doubted that he was born “Richard,” either. Still he tried to be helpful.
By this point I was down to two questions: 1) How the heck did this happen?, and; 2) will my numbers reappear during some restore or is it up to me to find and reenter them?
“Richard” had no idea how it happened and, sadly, it’s up to me to do the dirty work of restoring the data.
I hope he’s wrong on that last part. I hope that the Orbitz technology is robust enough to correct such a problem, especially after it has been brought to their attention. But the somber finality with which”Richard” gave me the bad news suggested that you can’t go home again. Or at least I can’t.
If so, think what this means. Even if cosmic rays somehow nuked my and ONLY my profile information from among millions of registered users (my new and old reservations were intact) the idea that the information couldn’t be restored was disturbing. What kind of an outfit is this, anyway? And if the problem extended beyond me and thousands or millions of Orbitz users were inconvenienced, well then my loyalty is at an end. Because a company that can erase my information can also lose it, and I don’t need that data floating around.
If you are an Orbitz customer please check YOUR profile information and see if your frequent flier numbers and credit cards data are intact.
Get back to me on that, okay?
bob,
regarding losing your data – you missed the point – there was a backup – and they have access to it – and they could use it – but they DECIDED NOT TO – you and your data are NOT IMPORTANT ENOUGH to pick through, restore and filter back into the main system your small dataset.
Keep in mind why banks have fees on oddball transactions like overdraft – it costs them more money when you squeal than when you keep quiet, there is no way they can restore data for individuals – who knows how many – especially when it will not cost them anything to ignore you. they have enough to do.
the transition from eudora to Gmail is painless and the benefits are huge, the main one being you don’t have to backup as frequently and you can use your email without your computer.
you must still backup gmail – i do this from pop using thunderbird – the desktop successor to the Eudora franchise.
then i store all of my old email back to 1995 in Info Select, but you could simply index it in text files using Google Desktop.
brad
bob,
regarding losing your data – you missed the point – there was a backup – and they have access to it – and they could use it – but they DECIDED NOT TO – you and your data are NOT IMPORTANT ENOUGH to pick through, restore and filter back into the main system your small dataset.
Keep in mind why banks have fees on oddball transactions like overdraft – it costs them more money when you squeal than when you keep quiet, there is no way they can restore data for individuals – who knows how many – especially when it will not cost them anything to ignore you. they have enough to do.
the transition from eudora to Gmail is painless and the benefits are huge, the main one being you don’t have to backup as frequently and you can use your email without your computer.
you must still backup gmail – i do this from pop using thunderbird – the desktop successor to the Eudora franchise.
then i store all of my old email back to 1995 in Info Select, but you could simply index it in text files using Google Desktop.
by the way- info select is the way to go for your frequent flier numbers, every login for every web site and every credit card number etc etc – quick and easy it’s the way to go. if all of my information were not in a PIM like this i would not be able to breathe.
brad
Don’t want this to happen again? Want to buy your tickets from somebody who actually gives a $hit? Well, there are millions of real travel agents out there just dying to help you, and knowing your preferences is part of their job. You might have to pay a fee (thanks to greedy airlines like United and BA killing agent commissions), but you’ll never get equivalent service from a website.
Bob,
With as many years experience as you have, not having your data stored safely surprises me. Systems fail and Orbitz is just another system, like harddrive. It will fail and recovery may not happen or happen completely.
This is why I’ve used things like Passwords Plus (Palm/Windows) and 1Password (iPhone and OS X).
Good luck with hunting down all those numbers.
OS X’s Keychain Access. Put whatever you want in there, securely.
Bob,
My profile is blank as well and I have been a fairly regular user of Orbitz (4+ times a year on average) since 2001. After checking just now, all they seem to remember of me is my email address, which would be hard for them to forget since it also serves as the username. No credit card info, no billing or mailing addresses, no frequent flier numbers. I have just come to expect this of online companies like Orbitz: every now and then you’re going to get “reset” and have to go through some sort of minor re-registration process. I’ve had to do that with every online retailer in one way or another with the sole exception of Amazon.
I would just say that failures are a fact of life, and every company worth their salt has some sort of backup and disaster recovery process documented and in place. I don’t give companies any extra credit for that. It’s something they should be doing in the first place. Where you will really get insight into a company is how well and quickly they successfully respond to those failure events when they do happen.
To Orbitz: Good luck keeping your customers, guys. For some of us, this is the last straw on top of really bad customer service.
But…they have a hovercraft!
Clearly, although their marketing is aimed at nerds, their service is not.
Sorry for your loss. Anyway, for what it’s worth, all of my data is still safely in Orbitz.
PCI
My affinity program and credit card numbers are still in my Orbitz profile.
You can easily copy whole folders of your e-mail from Eudora to Gmail via IMAP.
Or you can backup & restore the e-mail using IMAP server running on the localhost or on LAN
@Matt
Finally someone that gets it.
I’m gonna sound like an old geezer, but not all new things are better. Lately everyone seems to trade in security (including back-ups) for ease of use. People are getting lazy.
[...] couple weeks ago you may recall a column I wrote about how Orbitz, the Internet travel service, lost all my personal data including my [...]
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regarding losing your data – you missed the point – there was a backup – and they have access to it – and they could use it – but they DECIDED NOT TO – you and your data are NOT IMPORTANT ENOUGH to pick through, restore and filter back into the main system your small dataset.
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Keep in mind why banks have fees on oddball transactions like overdraft – it costs them more money when you squeal than when you keep quiet, there is no way they can restore data for individuals – who knows how many – especially when it will not cost them anything to ignore you. they have enough to do.
the transition from eudora to Gmail is painless and the benefits are huge, the main one being you don’t have to backup as frequently and you can use your email without your computer.
you must still backup gmail – i do this from pop using thunderbird – the desktop successor to the Eudora franchise.
then i store all of my old email back to 1995 in Info Select, but you could simply index it in text files using Google Desktop.
by the way- info select is the way to go for your frequent flier numbers, every login for every web site and every credit card number etc etc – quick and easy it’s the way to go. if all of my information were not in a PIM like this i would not be able to breathe.
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