No customer service available

Cory Doctorow calls it enshittification.

And it happens especially with the behemoth companies, the too-big-to-fail, the monopolies.

All in the interest of cutting staff and outsourcing customer service to a bot.

Over the last three months, I have tried to reach Booking.com. To get a response. A human. Anyone who cares. (They don’t.) To get a refund on a hotel booked to see my father in his last stage of life. He died before we got to the hotel. 

I have tried to get a refund for the security deposit on a hire car from Sixt. Now two months later. Nothing.

I have emailed, mailed, and called EVA Air to request a refund for the fee they charged after an agent gave us incorrect information about travelling with surfboards.

They do not care. None of them.

This is why I choose, every single time, the startup. The small. The local. 

Not Google. Not Microsoft. Not Meta. Free isn’t free. Free comes at the price of our souls. And honest, decent customer service.

I would rather the smaller pain of working with a new, building-as-they-go, enterprise that communicates to the people who take those first risks, than the perceived safety of the large, greedy, careless companies.

In the scheme of the big enshittified companies, we, their profit engines, are worth nothing in the singular. 

We scream into the vacuum. And they do not care. The money machine keeps purring, trapped in the game, we are. Until we choose to stop playing with them.

PS. In the interest of opportunity, there is a business solution to this. A global NFP customer complaints union. Where, rather than the singular voice fighting, it becomes a collective. Not me trying to contact booking.com 1000+ people, and the social media stories to match. We have the technology to build this now. Any one game to do this?

Published April 23rd 2026. Photo taken April 22nd 2023