… should probably take heed of my own advice above (its Welsh—I'm Welsh!), but its never stopped me yet ...
I quite often fly out of UK airports, where a near monopoly in car parking on these sites is held by National Car Parks (NCP).
Given the high prices for parking, booking in advance is advisable (for reduced costs!) and on quite a few occasions due to changes in schedule or vehicle I’ve needed to revise my bookings …
… the fun begins …
NCP have what looks like quite a nice site (http:///www.ncp.co.uk), tidy, clean interface, relatively easy booking … but, woe betide the person who needs to return here after the fact and modify an existing booking. Googling with many combinations of “site:www.ncp.co.uk booking amendment/change”, etc point you to one or two appropriate pages in FAQs which eventually leads to “site:www.ncp.co.uk manage my booking” which yields the immortal passage:
“Simply click on “Manage my Booking” at the top of the website”
Only problem now is that no page header includes the “Manage my Booking” text!
So it looks as if a somewhat recent make-over omitted this useful link across the site, so who was responsible for usability testing … surely, making/amending/cancelling bookings is the number one function for this site and a huge revenue generator … did no-one subsequently do a sequence of tests of base functionality from a customers POV?
So, to aid my future sanity and hopefully to help anybody else Googling similar terms I’ll just note that modifications/amendments to existing bookings are actually carried out on a different site completely, namely the snappily titled:
and to note that it now seems that the only link to that site from NCPs standard site is to trigger a rollover effect panel (which isn’t visually indicated in any way) for airport booking on their homepage and note a small footnote on the dialog that appears subsequently!!
Aah …
