Usability Disaster – Wallace and Gromit at the Odeon – or not

I am really looking forward to Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit and wanted to book tickets for next week, as it’ll be too packed now. Well, I went to the Odeon web site to book tickets for my girlfriend, her sister and me, just to realise it does not work at all on Firefox. You seem to need MSIE to order a ticket, which makes the accessibility statement even more ludicrous. There have been some nasty incidents with that in the past, and it seems that Odeon haven’t learnt a bit.

Now, even with MSIE the site is ridiculously hard to use – 5 clicks where one could be enough, flashy navigation and re-invented scrollbars being in my way all over the place. I ordered tickets for Thursday and got a “thank you” page after entering my credit card details thanking me for my ticket order for Tuesday. There was no review option of my order before sending my payment off.

Not to worry, there is the phone. I called the number provided on the site and got to an automated voice recognition system that works quite well – provided you want to order tickets, not to ammend your order or complain about an issue. Ordering tickets and hearing what is on are the only options.

The contact us section of the page offers another telephone number which informs me that I have to pay extra to get this service! No thank you, I will not pay for your bad IT implementation.

Last option was the email provided: bookings@odeon.co.uk. This one came back a day later. with the following:

Your message Subject: Re: Odeon Booking Confirmation was not delivered to: Bookings@odeonuk.com because: Router: Unable to open mailbox file ODEOND4/SRV/ODEON mail.box: Server not responding

How is that for service?