An e-mail confirmation of a booking made on Orbitz just generated a moment of cognitive dissonance.
The first line of the message (and hence the “preview” visible in my online Gmail account) reads:
“Your pop-up blocker is preventing you from viewing this content. Override the program by holding the Control key while clicking the link.”
OK, so it’s not actually as bad as pop-up ads in e-mail. The message is very obviously generated directly from the purchase confirmation page, which does bear that header because (duh!) pop-ups are pretty much blocked by default in every contemporary browser version.
So why doesn’t Orbitz cut out the practice on its site, and thus improve the quality of its e-mail program?
Curiously, while the pop-up message is very prominent in my Web-based Gmail account, it doesn’t appear at all in the version that landed in my e-mail client. Strange.