The Hilton web site, which I have used for more than 10 years to book hotels, was stable for a long time. Within the last year, however, they have started making changes. It is getting worse with every improvement they install.

It forgets who I am and requires that I log in over and over again. It drops my reservations, so I have to keep checking if they actually took, and it has this annoying feature where when you’re done with one reservation and you need to go back to the main site there is no way to do it. So you end up having to use the back button on the browser, which confuses it even more.

So I broke down and tried to send them some feedback. See the form below. When I tried to select the operating system, Windows 7, the most popular and newest, was not even one of their options. Then I typed a message with detail, giving them some pointers of what’s wrong. When I got to 500 characters it hung up and eventually cleared the screen.

That did it. The message below is the result:

What’s with these sites that give you 500 characters only to say your feedback? This is programmers dictating what users can do for their convenience. Hilton needs serious help in the web programming department.

They have it completely backwards. Customer service at its worst.