What a wonderful email I received from Expedia this morning. They’re following up on a hotel stay that I booked through them. They’ve given it a week so as not to pressure me, and have now sent me an email asking me to take a survey on my stay at Unknown…

What a shame that they don’t know where they booked me in, and by the solitary comma up at the top, it looks like they believe that my name is blank. This really is a case where they’ve obviously not fully tested their email system to ensure that it’s sending out the appropriate messages, similar to this issue that Jeff Herrity talked about recently. Testing and usability are 2 pieces of the online puzzle that, for some reason, seem to be an afterthought, if even that, which is a shame because if the functionality isn’t right and the site isn’t easy to work with, you’re going to leak customers when there’s no need to.