Travel Troubleshooter: The reservation that wasn't
Beth Zukowski books six airline tickets on AirTran Airways through Expedia. The online agency charges her a booking fee and bills her for flight protection insurance, but fails to buy her tickets. The reason? Her credit card was declined, it says. But her credit card company disputes the story. Now AirTran wants her to pay more than $200 extra to buy new tickets. What should she do? more than $200 more than I originally paid. Or should have paid. Expedia won't help me either. Is there anything you can do? -- Beth Zukowski, Glenwood Springs, Colorado not kept you on hold for hours on end. One reason you buy tickets through a site like Expedia instead of directly through an airline is that the online agency will be there to help you when something goes wrong. The company's highly-publicized "Expedia Promise" guarantees, among other things, that you can "count on us to provide support throughout your trip" adding that, "whether you have questions about your itinerary, have a change in travel plans, or need help resolving a problem with the trip you booked, we're here to help 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our job is to satisfy you!" OK, then. The implication is that Expedia is as good as -- if not better than -- the travel agent around the corner. But what kind of travel agent charges you a booking fee, plus insurance, but neglects to buy a ticket? What kind of agent puts you on hold for four hours because there are no outbound phone lines? When Expedia didn't book your tickets, it should have notified you immediately, offering you the option of using a different credit card or canceling the entire transaction. I find it odd, and a little suspicious, that the booking fee and insurance charges showed up on your card without the tickets. To me, that suggests something might have gone wrong with either Expedia or with AirTran, not with your card. Your case brings up a question that's often raised by readers of this column: What's the value of a reservation? Is it worth the paper it's printed on? For you, the answers were: not much -- and no. Based on Expedia's "promise" I think you should have reasonably expected the online agency to fix your booking problem. Your mistake was to stay on the phone with the agency for hours at a time and then allowing it to pass you off to AirTran. Instead, you should have politely but firmly asked for a supervisor when it became apparent that the phone agent you were dealing with didn't have a clue about how to solve your problem. Better yet, instead of letting Expedia string you along on the phone, you might have considered sending a short, polite e-mail to the online agency explaining your situation and telling it what you think it needed to do in order to resolve your complaint. (I list the e-mail addresses of key Expedia executives on my site at csr.elliott.org.) I contacted Expedia on your behalf, and it agreed to honor the original ticket price. |
