Travel
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So... I'm getting married soon. This means juggling a zillion details to prepare for the wedding, the honeymoon, and the integration of two separate lives, all within a fairly short period of time. Just to further complicate things, while her family lives around here, mine doesn't, and I have family and friends back home who won't be able to make it to the wedding for various reasons, so my mom suggested, and we accepted, the idea of holding an "open house" back home at the end of the honeymoon. With all that to plan, a few things are bound to go wrong.
Well... one of them just did: I tried to plan travel arrangements for the honeymoon. And it's been a massive morass of
s.The plan looks like this: Have the wedding. Have the reception. Fly to Hawaii. Enjoy our time there. Fly back from there to Seattle. Have the open house. Fly home. Pretty straightforward, right? You'd think so, at least...
So I went on Orbitz to try to set up the vacation package. Oops, no. Sorry. We're flying back to a different city than we're departing from, because of the open house, and apparently you can't book a package if it's not a round-trip flight, because raisins. (
#1)
OK then, I'll book the flights and the hotel/car rental package separately. So I looked for flights out on the evening of the wedding. Wasn't able to find anything that worked particularly well time-wise, and the fiancee vetoed the idea because apparently she has a lot of trouble sleeping on airplanes. So... OK. No big deal, I'm fine with booking it for the next day.So I went in and tried to book the 3-flight trip starting the next day, and ran into a huge morass of technical difficulties. Orbitz kept screwing up one thing or another, including repeatedly processing my instructions to book a 3-flight trip as if I had only requested the first flight. I got all the way to the checkout stage multiple times before reviewing things and realizing I only had one flight on there, and then cancelling it and starting over. (
#2.) Finally, finally, I did manage to get the correct flight set I wanted... only to have it rejected by my bank because the cost was over my limit. An automated system sent me a text from the fraud department asking me to verify this suspicious purchase, which I did... and then it still wouldn't go through! ( #3.) And it was late enough at night by this point that I wasn't able to reach a human being until the next day to get them to fix my limit. ( #4.)The next morning, I got through to someone at the bank and had them fix this up. By this point, of course, the hold that Orbitz had placed on my registration had expired, so I had to re-run the search and find my travel arrangements again. (Oh, by the way, when booking a multi-city trip, there's no actual way to select the flights one at a time. I easily found the three flights I wanted, but I had to search all the way down to the third page of results before I found the specific permutation that had all three of them together!) (
#5.) So while I was doing this, as fast as I could because I had the person from the bank on the line and I wanted to verify that the transaction actually went through this time so I wouldn't end up having to call back and wait on hold some more just in case it didn't work, I failed to notice #6: when I refreshed the search, somehow, somewhere in the bowels of Orbitz's system, apparently something got its wires crossed and it reset the departure date to the one I had originally been searching for! (Yeah. #7 is on me. I should have noticed that the date was wrong. In my defense, I was stressed and in a hurry.) So I ended up accidentally booking a flight that was scheduled to depart right in the middle of our marriage ceremony, instead of the next day.When I forwarded the itinerary to the fiancee, she picked up on that right away, thankfully. So I called up Orbitz support and asked for help fixing it, and it just got worse. Remember the bit about not being able to select the flights individually? Apparently, not only am I not able to do that, they aren't even able to do that! (
#8.) So instead of fixing that one flight and replacing it with a new one the next day, they had to cancel and re-book the entire 3-flight package. And they weren't even able to get the same flight on the third one, because there weren't any more seats available on it by this point. (Pointing out the obvious absurdity of this--that by canceling my tickets on that flight, those seats therefore become available for re-booking--did no good. Apparently their system is too dumb to recognize this.) ( #9.) Also, because I was re-booking 3 flights (even though I totally wasn't, and only wanted to change one of them, with no impact whatsoever on the other two,) their system wanted to charge a re-booking fee of $200, per person, per flight.Well screw that. I'm not paying $1200 to fix their mistake! I asked to be escalated to the supervisor and explained everything in detail. And between that and, I imagine, the supervisor looking over my travel plans and realizing just how many thousands of dollars I was spending with them on this trip alone and figuring I'm the sort of customer they don't want to alienate, she suddenly got all solicitous and helpful, offering to waive the rebooking fees (apparently she was unable to actually just change the one flight, because packages, but meh) and get things fixed up. It ended up "only" costing an additional $300 to fix.
So, after wasting 2 hours of my life on the phone with tech support, I finally have a working itinerary in my Inbox. It also comes with a pretty significant discount offer for hotels in Hawaii, which is nice because this is getting expensive. I pull up the link and go to book the hotel, and... yeah. There's no option to add a rental car to that. So I ended up having to get the hotel and rental car, in the same location for the same dates, separately. (
#10)How is it that this entire process is so utterly b0rked
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@masonwheeler
Probably because we took a perfectly good industry (travel agencies), replaced it with automation, and added a laser-like focus on the cheapest cost no matter what (the average consumer's preference, which the sites are now tuned to).
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@masonwheeler
At least with a travel agent, you have someone else who's accepting fiduciary responsibility for making sure your trip gets arranged and executed smoothly. You're really kind of lucky that the Orbitz supervisor had the right to waive the rebooking fee for you; the Terms of Use you agree to for booking sites are that any errors found after you click "yes, book this" are solely your fault and your responsibility -- they would have had ample legal ground for sticking you with the $1200 rebooking fees.
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@masonwheeler said in Travel:
How is it that this entire process is so utterly b0rked
Because you insisted on using a middleman instead of just booking flights/hotels/rental car directly with the respective agencies.
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@unperverted-vixen said in Travel:
@masonwheeler said in Travel:
How is it that this entire process is so utterly b0rked
Because you insisted on using a middleman instead of just booking flights/hotels/rental car directly with the respective agencies.
Basically, this. Never book flights and cars with anyone but the vendor or an actual real live travel agent.
Hotels are fine. There are sufficiently few variables.
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@unperverted-vixen said in Travel:
@masonwheeler said in Travel:
How is it that this entire process is so utterly b0rked
Because you insisted on using a middleman instead of just booking flights/hotels/rental car directly with the respective agencies.
Depends. Over here you have to weigh your choices - yes, buying/booking everything directly will give you more options and may save money.
But getting a package deal gives you more recourse options in case something goes wrong - for instance, flight was delayed/cancelled thus making you miss the first day of your holiday? You're eligible for a partial refund and your sales agency has to work for you to get you to your destination regardless.
At least that's the way it works in Europe.
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But getting a package deal gives you more recourse options in case something goes wrong - for instance, flight was delayed/cancelled thus making you miss the first day of your holiday? You're eligible for a partial refund and your sales agency has to work for you to get you to your destination regardless.
For any flight you purchased in the US they'd still have to get you to your final destination if you missed a connecting flight due to your original flight being delayed. Depending on the circumstances (like for their mechanical issues, but generally not weather related) they'll often pay for a hotel and food if the delay is overnight. I've never heard of refunds though they might give you vouchers for future purchases.
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I've always booked flights and hotels online (never car rentals, though, because those aren't part of my travel plans[1]). I never encountered such a pile of
as you describe.[1] I rented a car once, but I didn't need a flight or hotel that time, and I went to a physical agency.
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@boomzilla Well, the airplane part works similarly. But it's also about the day of your vacation you missed at your destination. That's the part you're usually out of luck on when you book everything individually. Same goes for rebooking rental cars and stuff.
