Experient Championships Hotel Reservations

[Pat Fairbank]

I discovered today that the Experient website is literally the worst website I have ever used, in the entire world and the history of the Internet.

After getting an e-mail saying that our rooms would be released if we didn't fill in the names by Monday, I just spent the last two hours doing that. Back in the Steele days this was a simple process -- you were presented with a single form that showed all your rooms and had four name fields for each room. It took ten minutes, tops.

For Experient, you have to:

1. Register every single person on the team going with a bunch of useless fields in addition to their name (I have no idea if a particular student has been to the Championship before or is interested in being an ambassador, and ain't nobody got time to ask them)
2. For each room that you want to populate
   1. Click through a search page where you have to re-enter the occupancy dates for the rooms you have already booked
   2. Click again once the hotel you already have booked comes up in the results
   3. Click through yet another acknowledgement of the cancellation policy
   4. Select whether you want the room to be smoking or non-smoking (is it even legal to house students in smoking rooms?)
   5. Click again to open a dialog box to add each student, and search for their names using a box in which if you mess up, the backspace key doesn't work

FIRST has wasted thousands of mentor hours by switching to Experient, and probably hundreds of thousands of dollars in team funds due to (presumably) artificial scarcity and the resulting need for additional ground transportation.

Surely there must be a saner option for organizing hotel bookings on this scale?