25 June 2019

Last week, we were contacted by the web administrator and marketing manager of a hotel using the CultBooking booking engine. He indicated that he has inserted the URL we provided as iFrame on his WordPress website, as a booking button, and has problems with the CultBooking software: ”landing page is loading, but when user clicks on ‘search’, then the page remains blank and nothing else happens”, on Mozilla Firefox.

This is first time I was hearing about such an error with Firefox. If he would have said about Safari, I could understand it as the iOs technology is quite peculiar and needs extra care and indepth testings.

CultSwitch distribution manager tried her best to help this client and solve the problem. She has asked one our colleagues, that is more technical, for support:

• The application was tested as external link or direct link, here is example of direct URL: http://neo.cultbooking.com/CPC/?agentcode=52876&hotelcode=53948&lang=en

End result is that application performed outstanding, on various computers and also on mobile devices, like smartphones.

• Our colleague has even built an iFrame test environment and tested again and no problem. Everything working as expected.

They have made videos and sent them to system admin and marketer, showing the application works perfectly. Also the marketer made video proofing on his computer does not work.

Therefore, the issues could not be solved via email and by sending videos. Also we could not reproduce the same error he had on his particular PC. So, I called the system admin and we made a Team Viewer session.

I tested the application on his computer, have started with Chrome and was working perfectly, but when arriving to Mozilla, the blank page appeared. I was thinking it was an iFrame problem, so I looked at the code and extracted the URL and tested it as external link. The problem was still there. I have used another link that is using another server. So I came to conclusion is not iFrame problem, is not server problem, it is a strange case with the computer settings.

I asked system admin to deactivate the antivirus and also the firewall as that may cause also problems. He did so, but no advancements.

At this point, after so many tries and no concrete findings, I contacted our CTO that is a high level system admin and dev op. He suggested to turn off the add block plugin. Client did so and no improvement.

Given the complexity, I requested our CTO to call the client directly and do a screen sharing. They have tested together and seen that the client was using a strict cookies policy that is causes the user session to break and CultBooking langing page did not work.

Here is guide on how to unblock cookies on Mozilla(click here).

As conclusion we can see that our client had so many security levels and custom settings on his computer, that we had to check all posibilites to discover where the problem is: ad blocking, firewall, antivirus, cookies blocking.

THE FIX:

Our developers created and released a solution that is detecting if the browser has cookies disabled and turn on dynamically the feature in case of need.

SUPPORT AND HELP:

For questions and help, you can reach us via the contact form or directly by email: info@cultbooking.com