For Your Convenience

Earlier today, I visited travelocity.com to price out a flight and hotel package to Las Vegas. After picking my hotel and finding the flight schedule I wanted, the website brought me to the page where they list all the shows and tours and excursions and even meals or shopping packages that you can purchase for while you're on the trip. I was greeted with the message, "For your convenience, we have added ground transportation to your purchase. If you do not wish to purchase ground transportation, please change the quantity of transfers to 0 and confirm your selection."

Now, "for your convenience" is one of those danger phrases, like "to better serve you" and "as an added benefit to our customer," that corporations use to disguise what would otherwise be a naked cash grab. On this occasion, the website makes you go through a multi-step, non-intuitive process to decline something you didn't want anyway. The ground transportation they speak of is a round-trip ticket for one of those shuttle vans that ply the Strip. If you have more than one person, a taxi is only marginally more expensive and much quicker, especially considering that you must schedule your return pick-up with the shuttle company several hours earlier and then hope they show up on time.

I find this type of marketing to be disingenuous, if not altogether deceptive. It's one thing to have to click through three pages of tours or show tickets they're trying to cross-sell you (especially since the same tours or tickets are 30% cheaper if you purchase them directly from the operator once you're at your destination). It's another thing when an additional product is added to your package without you specifically requesting it. Granted, the basic rules of caveat emptor require you to read through a web page before you click the button to check out, and the unsolicited inclusion of ground transportation is clearly noted if you read the first few lines of the page. However, it is a reasonable assumption that when you select the product you want online and then click "Continue" on all successive pages until you reach the checkout screen, you won't end up with any extras.

To make matters worse, Travelocity includes the waste of money that is travel insurance in your package, forcing you to actively decline that add-on as well. Because of all the steps I had to take to avoid being charged for unwanted extras, "for your convenience" is anything but.