Expedia Service - Horrible - Don't Use Them

The title really says it all, but here was my experience ...

I booked tickets for several one-way hops through different cities in a long week of travel on several airlines through Expedia. I needed to make a change to one of the legs and there's no way to do that online, so I called Expedia customer service. For a dual fee - both Expedia and the airline charge a fee for changing the ticket they changed the leg. What I didn't realize is that the customer disservice representative also change the other flights in my itinerary. She read the flight times over the phone very quickly to me (at the time I was wondering why she was bothering to mention the other flights) and I stopped her on the one that had changed and asked her what it was - and yes, she got that one right. The rest she changed from evening flights to early morning flights.

Unfortunately, I didn't catch that she had made that change until I was looking at what time my flight left in the morning of my second day - whoops - I missed the flight already. So I call Expedia. I'm on hold forever and then the rep tells me that, yes, they can see what happened, but that there's nothing they can do about it. I should talk to the airline. I asked repeatedly to talk to the supervisor or someone who would have authority to do something about this (note: the whole time I'm at a client site with them waiting for me to resolve this). The rep absolutely refused to put the supervisor on the phone. Literally refused. They kept refusing and saying there's nothing we can do until I was actually pretty mad and expressing that to the rep.

I finally asked, "So what you are telling me right now is 'screw you mr. customer' and 'you cannot speak to anyone else'." And he said, "Sorry for the situation."

Yikes! I'm still somewhat shocked.

Delta (the airline involved) did handle the situation at a cost of $150 per leg of the journey in order to yank the reservations back from Expedia.

By the way - total time - 90 minutes - 60 minutes with Expedia being put on hold while the rep talked to people. And 30 minutes with Delta waiting for them to answer and then to make changes. My client was understanding about the situation - but that made things uncomfortable to say the least.

From now on, it's go direct with the airline for me. And make sure I tell everyone that Expedia should absolutely, under no circumstances be paid anything. Go ahead and look up travel arrangements, but book direct.

I'm also struggling a bit to figure out what I can and should do here.


By the way - I'm not alone. I did a quick search for Expedia Service and found lots of examples - actually - I didn't see anything that indicates a good experience:

Expedia: Customer Service Shortcomings - Associated Content
Expedia Bad Customer Service

Free Textbooks

Normally when a PR person approaches me with a story, I'm not all that interested, but this one struck me as a pretty interesting development, so I thought I'd put out the information with a bit of commentary.

Flat World Knowledge, a publisher of free and open college textbooks, today announced it will soon begin the nation’s largest in-classroom test of open college textbooks. The nationwide beta test of its books involves hundreds of students from 15 colleges and universities across the United States. Flat World Knowledge’s free and open textbooks will replace traditional textbooks in a single class or class section at each participating institution. The beta test begins this August and will run through the completion of the Fall 2008 semester.

Flat World Knowledge has built a business model around offering free textbooks to college students. Through their open platform, students will have access to complete textbooks free of charge, with the option to purchase affordable alternate formats of the content (i.e. print & audio versions of the text, podcast study guides, mobile phone flash cards, etc.).

Flat World Knowledge’s mission is to take the best characteristics of traditional textbook publishing - such as expert-written, peer-reviewed and professionally edited texts -- and then flip the old model on its head. Flat World’s books will be open for faculty to customize, and free to students online. Flat World and its authors earn compensation by offering affordable choices to students beyond the free online book, from printed textbooks for under $30 (printed-on-demand), to audio books for under $20, to downloadable and printable files by the chapter, and more. The company supplements its texts with low-priced study aids like DRM-free podcast study guides, digital flash cards, interactive practice quizzes, and more.

Free textbooks. Pretty cool. I wonder if they can make money with the alternative models. If you look at companies like Cramster that provide community and answers to text book problems - often oriented around particular college texts without the direct involvement of the publisher, then you have to believe that there will be communities around text books emerging and likely you can monetize off of that. Just not sure if it will be the publishers.

Eric Frank, Flat World Knowledge co-founder and chief marketing officer. “This new model of textbook publishing will result in increased choices and dramatically lower costs for students. It can enhance learning by giving instructors more control over content, and by leveraging the power of social learning networks around content. Between the oligopolistic practices of the big publishers on one end of the spectrum, and piracy on the other, lies a better solution – open textbooks.”

There's quite a few things in between - and there's also social text books. But this would seem to be a good approach for publishers to stay relevant in a Wiki world. It will be interesting to see what happens.

25 Million Hits Per Day

Fortune Magazine interview with GE's CIO:

Does social networking have a role within General Electric?

We've gone out of our way to call it professional networking rather than social networking. We've been building a professional-networking capability that allows everybody to put in the organization directory the skills that they bring to bear. It's very searchable, so if someone is looking for a particular skill, they can go to that site. That gets about 25 million hits a day, so it really is becoming sort of a heartbeat of the company.

25 million hits a day - wow, that's quite a bit. Not sure what's included there, but wow!

Objections

This post is intended to capture a few of the common objections that I hear at various sessions as well as ways that people suggest you overcome those objections. I will update this over time.

Kevin Jones recently went through and captured 15 Objections to Social Learning and some thoughts on responses to these objections:

• Objection #15: Silent Yet Deadly
  
• Objection #14: Prove It!
• Objection #13: How Do You Measure ROI?
• Objection #12: How Will You Measure That It Is Working?
• Objection #11: Too Much Info
• Objection #10: Wasting Time
• Objection #9: They Aren’t Technical
• Objection #8: Out of Date Information
• Objection #7: The Information is Wrong!
• Objection #6: Mixing Things Up
• Objection #5: How Do You Know it’s Accurate?
• Objection #4: Posting Anything, Including Bonobos
• Objection #3: Control of Information
• Objection #2: What Does This Have To Do With Training?
• Objection #1: Socialize!

There's another good post on a related topic - Ten Common Objections to Social Media and How to Respond - includes:

1. I suffer from information overload already.
2. So much of what's discussed online is meaningless. These forms of communication are shallow and make us dumber. We have real work to do!
3. I don't have the time to contribute and moderate, it looks like it takes a lot of time and energy.
4. Our customers don't use this stuff, the learning curve limits its usefulness to geeks.
7. Upper management won't support it/dedicate resources for it.
8. These startups can't offer meaningful security, they may not even be around in a year - I'll wait until Google or our enterprise software vendor starts offering this kind of functionality.
9. There are so many tools that are similar, I can't tell where to invest my time so I don't use any of it at all.

I would also look at establishing policies: Corporate Policies on Web 2.0

Good Questions Identify eLearning 2.0 Opportunities

I'm a big fan of questions (see Better Questions for Learning Professionals) and as I'm preparing a workshop (Revolution in Workplace Learning) one of the things I stumbled upon is what seems to be a great new question:

Given that eLearning 2.0 (web 2.0, wikis, blogs, social networking, etc.) represents new ways of supporting learning and work ... as a learning professional, what are the new questions that I need to ask as part of analysis?

There must be new questions that we need to ask in order to figure out if and how eLearning 2.0 approaches apply to given performance improvement needs.

In this post, I want to focus on questions that will help identify if there are opportunities for using eLearning 2.0 approaches as part of your performance intervention.

I would very much like to hear your thoughts on this. Some of the questions that come to mind that I would use to:

Identify eLearning 2.0 Opportunities:

Content -

• What content is already shared through other means? Ex. are lessons learned discussed, or work-arounds.
  
• Is there information that can be created and shared coming from either a 3rd party (e.g., a help desk, experts, etc.) or from the audience itself?
• What content gets updated more frequently?
• What reference material is already being created that might be a target?
  

Audiences -

• Who has the pain?
  
• Who's going through an experience that they would want to share?
  
• Who is able and active enough to use the tools to create content?
• Does it align with their motivation or can it be aligned with their motivation?
• Are there natural content creators that we could leverage?
  

•

So, what questions do you ask to identify eLearning 2.0 opportunities?

Learning Professionals Leaders

On this month's Big Question - Lead the Charge - we are already seeing some interesting responses.

The Learning Revolution: Where have all the leaders gone?

It's difficult to not agree with everything that's in Tony's post an my short answer would be: yes they should, and the good ones already are.

So, of course, I say, great post. :) There are some interesting thoughts in the post, but also

Most learning professionals can only do so much. There's a vacuum of leadership in the adoption of enterprise/web/learning 2.0 tools from learning professionals in senior positions and too many barriers put up by over-zealous HR and IT departments. Over 50% or organisations in the UK are still on Internet Explorer 6 and I've come across some that restrict javascript and all cookie. This makes using something like google docs or pbwiki as an experiment somewhat difficult for the poor, lonely learning professional.

I'm not sure I buy this. Is it okay for a learning professional to be unaware at this point of social media and its impact on learning and work? I can understand barriers to being able to put it into practice (and there are many barriers), but not barriers to being aware. My experience at ASTD recently was that most people were completely unaware of all of this. They have their head in the sand.

Harold Jarche in Skills 2.0:

Today, active involvement in informal learning, particularly through web-based communities, is key to remaining professional and creative in a field. Being a learning professional in a Web 2.0 world is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.

Gina Minks: Adventures in Corporate Education What Competencies do Knowledge Workers Need?

How can you design with these new tools if you don’t understand them? How can you apply them to your existing systematic learning system if you don’t know what the heck wiki even means? So, yes, learning professionals must learn and use these tools, and then apply the tools to there existing framework.

She lists the tools and what you should know as:

• Wikis: How to edit, how to read, how to link to
• RSS Feeds: What are they, how do I read one, once I have a reader set up how do I scan info collecetd, how do I share info using one
• Blogs: How do I write one. Why SHOULD I write one. How do I evaluate info from one. How do I scan, collect keywords, and rescan to crystallize ideas and information?
• Information Creation tools: Exps: Youtube, SlideShare, Flickr. How do I use. Why/When do I use.
• Tagging: What is this? Why is it important? How do I use with content I create? How do I use to search for info I need?

Great stuff Gina. And there are some good comments in her post including:

A lot of “us” learned these technologies organically, as we needed to. Trying to come up with ways to teach people them all at once is going to be challenging.

If you can come up with ways to show the results of the tools, that people who are attracted to the technology will find ways to learn the tools. Nobody cared about wikis until wikipedia came along. Nobody cared about RSS readers until information overload made them a necessity.

I think the thing we have to be careful of is teaching the tools outside of the benefits.

Clark Quinn - Learnlets: Lead the Charge? talks about how learning organizations must transition from

the perspective from a training group being an expendable cost-center to a learning capability that’s central to organizational effectiveness and performance.

Video Ratings

I received a question today and thought I'd ask blog readers if they can help with answers. The question comes from a blog reader who captures a lot of different videos within their organization. They have "over a couple of thousand of video and audio clips that new hires and tenured employees are currently using for on-boarding and training."

What they want to do is to help employees better access the video content. They've seen viddler which allows people to tag specific sections within the video. They are interested in that capability, but also in rating the videos, and especially rating portions of the videos.

That makes me wonder ...

To me it seems that having video rating and/or video tagging for the video as a whole would make sense, but I'm not convinced that it makes sense for portions of the video. Do you think it makes sense to rate / tag specific sections of video? Will it distract learners?

What tools or solutions would you recommend they consider as part of their solution?

Any other thoughts on video ratings or video tagging?