flying dutchman

Folks,
Though i would share our nightmare experience with Expedia.com - the online travel agent with you:

Back in August, my partner and I shopped around for the best flights to Perth for a recce visit. Expedia beat all the competition by around £100 hands down.

The problems arose when we had to cancel our tickets due to unforeseen circumstances. I cancelled them after numerous calls to Expedia to establish the penalties etc. Ended up having to call Qantas myself and do a lot of the legwork. Finally, we cancelled on 27 September losing about £200-.

I was told at the time to expect a wait of 3 months to get my money back - £1,200, as Expedia needed to be refunded by the airline first. Fair enough i suppose.

Numerous chaser emails since were met with an automated response about the 3 month clause and so i duly waited until 27 December before hassling them. On the 27th, whilst recovering from the excesses of Christmas, I called only to be told that because I hadn't returned the tickets, we would have to wait another 3 months from receipt of tickets to get our money back.

I lost it at this stage saying that they had never told us to do this and numerous calls later and hours of my life wasted in phone-music limbo-land, a superviser agreed to refund the money immediately as it had been their error. He did say it might take until the first week of January to appear on my account.

I sent the tickets back - recorded - thank god! Expedia don't seem to have received them, but I have proof of sending.

Guess what? We are now nearly half way through Jan and no sign of the money. After daily calls I have today been told the money was refunded on 5 January, but may take 28 days to reach my account, and then shortly after received an email from someone else that they would now refund the money and it would be in my account in 5 days!!!

Oh, and I am sparing you the pain of numerous phone calls where Expedia's policy is to only refund onto the same credit card the flights were booked with. This despite the fact that that card got stolen from me back in November and I now have a new account.

Needless to say I am still without my money, Expedia has failed to confirm whether they have or haven't refunded me yet and whether the money will take 5 days to reach me, or a more leisurely 28.

Internet booking agents may be cheaper, but beware. Expedia's customer service department is run by Attile the Hun! And they are supposed to be one of the better agents!

flying dutchman

tiredwithtwins

hi
have you thought of complaining to IATA? (think thats the right one) is there an airline travel ombudsman?
Bad customer service.....you should have threatened them with going to the press!
hope you get your dosh back soon, £1200 is rather a lot of money - were you not covered by your insurance?

sue

donna

oh buggerwe booked with them,i hope we dont have any problems .
donna

Go Banana's !!

Hi Flying Dutchman,

Sorry to hear about your probs with Expedia but just to add a bit of balance, Jill and I used Expedia for the first time to book a long weekend break together with connecting flghts from Newcastle to Rome in August last year.

We were so impressed with the service and price that we would certainly have thought of using them again....until tonight ?

Good luck in getting your dosh back but I am sure they do get it right sometimes or maybe we were just lucky ?

Best wishes

Warren

bondipom

I used expedia.co.uk when they started but ever since they have not been the cheapest. You only find out how good a company is when things go wrong.

jandjuk

I'm not sure I believe in those websites really...

we had some problems with flightsforless.co.uk, which is part of lastminute.com - too long to go into the details but it put us off using anything other than a good travel agent.

websites are fine for cheap flights to europe, but when you're dealing with big money flights to oz/nz, it's too risky.

can't beat personal service from someone you can visit if you have problems. if it's a good one, they'll most likely match any fare you find on the web anyway.

we found trailfinders to be the cheapest for us....

bondipom

If you buy by credit card and the agents are covered by Abta and are CAA bonded you will be protected. The reason the sites are cheap is they cut back of personel.

Does anyone know of an ABTA or CAA bonding equivalent down under to protect consumers.

ABCDiamond

There is A.F.T.A. Australian Federation of Travel Agents . Not sure how good they are though. I recall a Travel Agents going down in Sydney once, and most customers did not get anything back. It was that bad that it made front page news, national papers.

Banksia

Maybe not. Include Flight Centre www.flightcentre.co.uk and www.flightcentre.com.au in your research.

The folk behind Flight Centre started Top Deck Travel in London years ago, sold it to management and moved on. My daughter's best friend worked for them until the travel bug caught her and she is now taking some time off. They have lots of small profit centres within the business which keep staff on their toes.

They did a documentary on the company some time back - claim to be the fourth largest retailer in Oz.

dotty

We booked through flightcentre one time, credit card and all. (They charge a penalty here if you use a credit card too). Anyway it turned into a right fiasco, flights were with an airline who went broke, because we paid on credit card we should have got our money back, but then its the agent who looses out. One year later we finally got the money back but it was only because we took on a battle involving the credit card co V the travel agent. Travel insurance would not touch it they wanted us to go down the credit card path.

Thats not it tho, we had part of the flight with Qantas. As one airline had gone down those flights were now useless. But according to flightcentre Qantas would not refund the money! Some months later one letter to Qantas resulted in our refund suddenly arriving.

Another glorious fiasco, was loosing 330,000 points when Ansett went down. We had earnt them through Westpac visa card but Westpac did not want to know. Seems a lot of buck passing goes on when somebodies got to pay up.

bondipom

Insurance, agencies will all try and fob you off to another party. Was that Ansett that went bust?

In the UK I bought cheap charter tickets to Athens only for the company to go bust. I bought them by delta so I had to claim back through the CAA. The process took about 7 months.

dotty

We managed the double the Australian airline Ansett and the Canadian one Canada 3000. I hate paying for fares early now, try to leave it as long as possible.

ABCDiamond

I've flown VirginBlue quite a few times, and have noticed that my credit card never gets charged until after the flight !
The last one was booked three weeks before flying, and charged 2 days after flight. Not sure if this is intentional, or just slow accounting, but it's good for the customer (ME).

flying dutchman

Just to update on my original post, I have now collected 4 different emails from expedia, each one advising of a different date when my money will be refunded, and each signed by someone different! (or maybe its the same person working from a shed in a field somewhere and who is laughing at me).

I plan to collate all the mails into a lovely bundle for their MD to accompany my scathing complaint letter, when they finally do return my money.

From personal experience, our last trip down-under was booked through an independent travel company who specialise in certain countries. The service couldn't have been better - even when i went back there 6 months later to get a copy of our original receipt for ASPC to back up our de facto relationship!

Think i will stick to physical travel agents from now on! You can always refuse to leave thier office until they cough up!

flying dutchman

pan

I have to agree that booking online can be fraught with problems.

We booked a flight to Melbourne with Emirates on ebookers. At first I couldn't believe how easy it was. It took less than 20 minutes to book and pay for the flight online.

But it took weeks of calling to actually get the tickets.

I received emails asking for information I had already given. Emails asking for confirmation of names. Of addresses. Debit card numbers. Even a request I fax a photocopy of my card to them. Unfortunately the people I was dealing with were not the fully trained and dedicated staff advertised on the website. Poor English, lack of understanding and definite lack of training created tension at both ends of the line.

After weeks of calling abroad via a London number I eventually got a number that took me through to an agent in the UK. It took them less than 10 minutes to confirm that everything was in order, they acnowledged they had had the money all along and that the tickets would be dispatched the next day. ebookers have obviously gone for the cheap labour option and are penny pinching on training.

It hasn't stopped me booking on line though - just done 3 flights in Oz - 2 with Virgin Blue and 1 with Quantas. Fingers crossed I don't have all the rigmarole with these.