Catch train 22 - why do travel sites never work?

Why do so many websites not work? Eurostar's never seems to work. You have to phone up, ask them not to charge you £5 for the privilege of buying a ticket from them because their site won't take a booking for free.

Here's a good one - it asks you to fill in the origin of the journey, but the box for that is missing.

The staff are obviously used to the web site not working, because they don't ask what the problem is, or remotely suggest that they are interested in getting it fixed (that's one for the WOCAS process www.budd.uk.com/wocas.html ). Feedback from customers and agents, so powerful but so few companies are geared up to use it - fast+systematically.

Still at least it was simple to find the Eurostar phone number under customer support.

Unlike Virgin Trains which couldn't accept my postcode ( I assure you I do live at my home address! ) and so I couldn't buy a ticket. No easy opt out to get help, but heh, no choice so why do they care. Unless I opted to go by air, using up all my "green" creds, I'd have to buy at the station anyway.

But it doesn't get any better by plane. I haven't been able to get onto the BA site to check in in the last hour. Seems like the site is down completely.