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Nightmare on E-Street
Sometimes booking travel online can make travelers wish they'd stayed home
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Business New Haven
10/27/2003
By: Mitchell Young
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One man’s tribulations pursuing low-cost airfares online:
In April, online travel retailer Travelocity announced plans to enter the small to mid-sized business market. If our experience is any indication, demanding small-business owners may be a tough sell for the online giant.
Travelocity started in 1996 and is now a subsidiary of Sabre, which runs the world’s largest Global Distribution Systems of airline flights and fares.
Almost half of all air travel in the U.S. — $80 billion annually — is booked through the Sabre system. Sabre was developed by American Airlines and IBM and installed at its first travel agency customer in 1960. The system is now in use at 56,000 travel agency locations worldwide.
According to Sabre, travel agencies book some 70 percent of all air travel worldwide. Web sales are taking an increasing share, though. Once the pioneer in online travel retailing, Travelocity is under increasing pressure as new entrants Expedia, Orbitz and Stamford-based Priceline have moved in.
In the online travel world things go right, mostly. But not always. Software glitches, human error or bad connections as well as a confusing multitude of choices can make travel Web sites difficult to navigate.
For one e-customer, Travelocity proves the rule. Choose a destination for airfare and you’re presented with a list of flights, airlines and prices.
If you choose online purchasing at Travelocity, be forewarned: Look closely and click carefully.
A mistake on Travelocity can be costly and every bit as aggravating as standing in line at the airport.
We processed our itinerary, added our credit card info, selected our seats — only to be informed at the end of 25 minutes (using a cable modem) that one of our flights was not really available.
Perhaps one of thousands of users beat us to the click and scoffed up our seat. So we started the process over, sort of like going to the end of the line. This time we made it through quicker — perhaps too quick.
That 6:40 a.m. flight we thought we had chosen was in fact at 6:40 p.m. We unfortunately accepted the sort option that shows listings based on price.
This time we had processed our payment. The system gives users an opportunity to review the itinerary before continuing, and should we have caught this error? Sure. But after battling their system and its endless searching, error messages, "weasel word" check boxes and special offers we were 90 minutes into the process, and enough seemed to be enough.
Not.
With the wrong flight, human intervention would be required.
After a few minutes of hunting the Travelocity site, we found a phone number. A lot of good that was: We could have driven to Travelocity’s office in the time it took the "1,000 customer service representatives" to answer the phone.
Not to worry, the recording reminded us at least 300 times: They "valued our business and our call was very important to them."
A customer service representative finally did finish with the previous satisfied customers and began to prove just how much they "valued our business and how important our call was to them."
"No problem," she said. "since I can see you just purchased your ticket, I will allow you to change the reservation without the typical $130 fee," Gee, I thought, humans really are better than machines."
"There will be a $5 service fee, however," she added. A $5 fee? Your Web site stinks, it took me two hours to make this transaction, I’m not even sure it was even my fault, and I had to wait for you forever — for this you want $5?
"If that’s not acceptable I will be happy to cancel the reservation and charge your card the $130 cancellation fee."
"Can I speak to your supervisor?" I asked in the most reasonable and measured tone I have.
Twenty minutes passed, until she returned to say, "That’s the policy. It’s the $5 fee and if you don’t want to do that you can keep the reservation or we’ll be happy to cancel it and charge you the $130." And either way is fine with us — or so the surly tone seemed to indicate.
Thinking that no major American company could possibly operate this way, I asked if this was really Travelocity on the phone (or perhaps some outsourcing experiment with inmates from the Texas penitentiary system)?
"That’s how I answered the phone, isn’t it?"
Can I have the phone number of the customer relations department? Can I have your name? I would like to be sure to tell them how pleasant my experience was.
"Patty in the Virginia office. No we don’t give out last names", or IDs for that matter.
Can I have a confirmation that you canceled the flight and won’t be charging my credit card?
"Your card may have already been charged. If that’s the case you need to understand that the charges could take up to two or three billing cycles to credit."
That’s 90 days, Patty. Okay, what is my confirmation number on the cancellation?
"There isn’t any — we will send you an e-mail."
Four more calls — and three e-mails confirming my itinerary — still no cancellation. Only a promise that it was canceled. I guess I’ll find out in a few months.
Happy landings!
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