Great Wolf Lodge, the hotel chain with big waterparks is very popular with families. So, when I heard that they were offering a sale on August 4th (8-4) with $84 rooms, I shared it to the Travel Better, Travel More Facebook group. The deal was pretty simple, $84 dollar rooms on 8/4 in honor of the 84-degree water in their water parks. The rooms are available from Sunday to Thursday between now and December 3, 2023 but they have to be booked on August 4th. Well Great Wolf Lodge is not only popular, it’s also pretty expensive so this sale was a lot more popular than they imagined.
Within minutes of posting the details of this deal, one of the members of the group told me that she had been waiting in the queue for hours and when she finally got through, there were no $84 rooms left. As I’m always looking to help people book travel, I figured I’d go on the website to see if I could do something different to help her find some dates. I really didn’t understand what she meant about the queue. Maybe she called? Either way, I went to the website and the deal was right there on the homepage. I clicked to do a mock booking and I was met with this screen:
While we’ve all seen concert ticket issues like the Taylor Swift ticket debacle from a few months ago, I can’t remember a similar issue that was travel related. I figured I’d check out Twit…I mean X to see if anyone else was going through this. It turns out that this whole situation was much worse than I thought. To summarize the tweets below, people have been waiting for a large chunk of the day and they are still don’t seem to be any closer to booking a room, some people claim that the website booked them more than one room and the few people that did get through did not find an $84 room or that the final price was much higher than they thought. In other words, this has been an incredible failure.
Potential customers express their frustration
Kat@wanderlustkatt
so now the line is paused even tho we’ve been waiting for over an hour 😭 this is horrible.
Zach Graham@z__a__c__h
@GreatWolfLodge
, Please reconsider this Queue-It (
@queueit
) nonsense. It is a terrible customer experience. I spent multiple hours in queue and then happened to miss my 10 minute window because the ETa kept changing.
Amoeba E 🦠@amoeba_ee
Lol so I started trying to book a reservation at 11 AM for great Wolf Lodge because we take the kids every year and apparently they have a sale going on today, this is my computer now at 5 PM, after six hours I’m only halfway there. 😤 they need to have a better system.
Emily Riedler@evmonte
Replying to@Matteo_6ix@GreatWolfLodge
I may just drive there. It’s 30 mins. At this rate they should give me some free stuff. For eating up my phone line all dang day and holding my
Money hostage.
David Yu@DavidYu2097454
Replying to @GreatWolfLodge
Not sure how $84 became $204.
Dorothy Nelson@PolkaDotN
Replying to @PolkaDotN
@GreatWolfLodge
Well, I’m calling it. An 1 hour & 45 mins is an hour and 30 mins longer than anyone should wait. If you’re waiting for someone to answer the phones at #greatwolflodge, I highly recommend you hang up and not waste your time.
Anas Ingar@ananasingar
@GreatWolfLodge
hi I waited 4 hours to book the 84degrees promo and no matter what date I choose I got an error about some opera calendar. please help.
Matthew@Mattoaklandas
Replying to @GreatWolfLodge
this is so bad. It literally went through to booking the actually suite and then said maintenance. I literally was picking my room… come on now
Nyy😘@nyyglockk
Why tf would Great Wolf Lodge have me on that website for 8 hours and this s* the same price😒
🦄🦄🦄@furrygang
Replying to @GreatWolfLodge
Did I seriously just wait in line for almost 6 hours for you to have an error? I really hope you’re going to hold up your end cause that’s terrible
Lance Gibson@LanceGibson123
@GreatWolfLodge
I booked my reservation yesterday and am trying to call and cancel and cannot get through. Literally 6 hours on hold. I am past the 24 hour free cancel time now… I expect you to still honor the free cancellation due to this.
Ryan M. Wimberley@AnubisDroid
Just sat on hold for 5 hours and 17 minutes (cause the websites down) only to be hung up on as soon as the hold music stopped.
@GreatWolfLodge
I know you’re busy today but I’m trying to cancel a reservation within my 24 hours.
🍎#LFGM🍎@DcMasta85
Replying to @GreatWolfLodge
I checked every week with Sunday through Thursday as the start and end dates from August through December. None were available.
Appreciate the reply.
MB@thesheriffman
Replying to@GreatWolfLodge
The character who will answer the phone. You guys double booked me and I can’t reach anyone to cancel the second reservation.
MarcTheBlerman@MarcTheBlerman
Replying to @evmonte and @GreatWolfLodge
So I’m not the only one who can’t get through. I was charged $134 for my room instead of $84…
Boilerplate response
The response from Great Wolf Lodge’s X account is a copy and paste response like this:
Great Wolf Lodge@GreatWolfLodge
Hi, Codine! Due to the high popularity of our 84 Degree Sale, we’re experiencing higher-than-usual call volume and website traffic. Please continue holding your spot in the waiting line until you’re able to book. We look forward to welcoming you and your family soon!
Compounding failures
Clearly, they completely failed here as they did not have the ability to handle the amount of website traffic or phone calls that they would receive. That much is obvious. However, they continue to compound their failures and it seems like there is a complete absence of leadership here. These problems started very early on according to people on X so the company knew by the time everyone came into work this morning that they are a huge problem. Instead of actually doing anything, customers are met with long hold times and boilerplate responses.
The company could have solved a lot of their own problems if they communicated with their customers via social media and their website. For example, if there are no $84 rooms left at one or more resorts, that should have been communicated. Most people are looking to book a specific location so why force them to wait on hold for hours only to find out that they are sold out? This would have save a lot of people some time. For example, let’s assume that 1,000 people are waiting in queue right now but 200 of them want the same location. If they are told that there are no $84 rooms available, most if not all of them will drop out of the queue. For whatever reason, this strategy didn’t cross anyone’s mind over there.
So what’s next?
It remains to be seen how Great Wolf Lodge is going to handle this. Unlike product companies that can make more of what they are selling, Great Wolf Lodge only has so many rooms to sell. They cannot possibly create more space that doesn’t exist. I don’t know how they make this right. Perhaps they’ll just hope that it blows over, but I question if this is going to wind up being a net positive for the company. Normally, any press is good press but when potential customers have a horrible experience with your company before they’ve even given you ever money, I’m sure at least some of those people will be turned off from patronizing that business in the future.
Hopefully other travel companies are taking notes and here and will not repeat these mistakes.