recently, my boyfriend david was trying to book a hotel room i'd found somewhere for our anniversary this year using my thinkpad x260 and librewolf. it kept failing to let him pay with an error, no matter how many scripts i allowed through noscript or other extensions i tweaked.

"okay," i said. "let's try vivaldi."

no luck with vivaldi either. so i sent him the link to the room via signal and he tried it again on his phone.

exact same error happened.

after a few more tries, david handed his phone to me so i could check to see if there was anything fixable on our end. i had a look at the address bar and it said he was in private browsing mode. i told him "that could be the issue, so try turning it off." he turned private browsing mode off.

the payment bloody suceeded.

this means the hotel's official website blocks privacy and cybersecurity protections because ???? anyway fuck accor hotels for not caring about their customers' privacy and stressing out my boyfriend especially and me heaps as a direct result. also for trying to force people to sign up to their very expensive loyallty program by making it selected by default during payment. they'll be getting a sternly worded email and maybe a report to the accc when i'm not running on 2 hours of sleep.......

#enshittification