Ask HN: Anyone Know Anyone at Expedia?
4 comments
I’ve been seeing similar issues with large travel sites lately, so your experience doesn’t surprise me. When the homepage returns a 200 but shows an error page, it usually means something broke in their reverse proxy or CDN rules. That tends to happen when a new deployment goes live without enough real-world testing.
Since most of Expedia Group’s support is script-driven, it’s almost impossible to report a technical problem unless you know someone on their engineering team. The shifting behavior across browsers and devices also makes it look like a bad A/B test or traffic-split configuration.
It’s not great when a company that size lets something this visible slip into production. Hopefully someone from their engineering team notices this thread and rolls back the change.
Since most of Expedia Group’s support is script-driven, it’s almost impossible to report a technical problem unless you know someone on their engineering team. The shifting behavior across browsers and devices also makes it look like a bad A/B test or traffic-split configuration.
It’s not great when a company that size lets something this visible slip into production. Hopefully someone from their engineering team notices this thread and rolls back the change.
Aha. Yes. Completely forgot about CDN involvement. Could easily have been a cloudflare problem.
Why didn’t you attempt to book on a competitor’s website?
I'm set in my ways and didn't want to have to create a new account. Had the hotels.com site not miraculously started working in another browser on a different operating system, I probably would have booked directly with the hotel.
I looked around online and the only support number goes to reps in the Philippines with the script for what to do when someone wants to change their booking. I tried to explain to them that I was wanting to report a problem with the web page and they kept asking what booking I wanted to change. I don't blame them... they're paid to read of a particular script.
And the last couple of hours it pretty intermittent via Firefox, less intermittent on Chrome. Worse on desktop than mobile.
So if anyone knows anyone over at expedia, can you tell them that they may want to back out the last change they made to their reverse proxy.
Do Expedia and Hotels.Com support the web anymore or am I supposed to buy an iPhone to run their app?
(I should mention that after several tries on three machines and six different browsers I eventually was able to make my booking. But that seems a little excessive. And their site doesn't seem so complex it can't support plain 'ol HTML. Say what you will about Amazon, but it still works with Firefox.)