03.24.05
Posted in life at 11:29 am by
Okay friends, I’ll let the cat out of the bag. We’re going back to the Carribean again this summer. If you were counting, that makes three trips in three short–but wonderful–years of marriage. I think you could call us junkies.
Lest you think that the Bad Christian household is ‘made of money’ allow me to explain. We’ve never actually paid for our lodging. The first trip was our honeymoon. We were given a generous gift of a week in a timeshare condo in St. Maarten. We stayed at the Flamingo Beach Resort. St. Maarten was probably our favourite trip thus far. The food on the island is unbelievable and if you have a rental car you can pretty safely go wherever you want and get there within an hour. It’s a small island, but lovely.
The next trip was to an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic. I used the hotel points and airline miles that I’d amassed at my job as a travelling salesperson of college educations to get us a free trip. We stayed at the Hamaca Coral Resort in Boca Chica. The Dominican isn’t St. Maarten, by any means. However, it was a great time.
Our upcoming trip was offered to us by the generous donation of my in-laws. We’ll be flying to the Turks and Caicos and staying on the island of Providenciales (aka Provo) for a week. We’ll stay at Beaches - Turks and Caicos. It sounds like a heavenly way to unwind from what has proven a long, hard year for Jen and I.
Anyway, believe it or not, all that was introduction. Here’s my beef.
Travelocity.
The folks at Delta cancelled the flight that I purchased. Should be no big deal, right? Right. Riiiight. It was a big deal. At 2:42 yesterday I got an email that said that I needed to call Travelocity right away, my flight reservation had changed. Turns out that my flight from Lansing to Cinncinati had been cancelled. However, I had been booked on a new flight.
So, I call Travelocity. Turns out the flight that I’d been booked on left lansing at 9:06 pm. This was problematic as my scheduled flight from Cinncinati to Atlanta left at 8:45pm. This is called a misconnect. The first gentleman I spoke with was certain that I needed to send my paper tickets back to the main Travelocity office in San Antonio so that I could be issued new tickets. I was assured that nothing could be done until I sent those paper tickets back. To accomplish the information transfer described above took around 20 minutes (most of that spent on hold.)
Well, I didn’t just want a paper ticket that would misconnect me, so I called travelocity back. This time I spoke with a woman named Jennifer. Nice woman. She informed me that the fellow I’d just spoken with for the past 20 minutes was, in fact, dead wrong about sending my paper tickets back. All I needed to do was show up at the airport. Great, I thought, now all we needed to do was deal with the misconnect.
Jennifer informed me that she would call Delta and set up a new flight for me. She put me on hold.
I don’t know if any of you have ever been on hold with Travelocity.com, but if you have been, you’re probably aware that their hold music is the sort that makes people go postal. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been on hold for, oh, say 10 or 15 minutes–but after 35 minutes of hold music I was about ready to start killing things.
At 40 minutes Jennifer came back on the line and informed me that the Delta representative was in on our call and would assist me. Great. Now something is going to happen, I thought. Well, long story short, the Delta agent (after about 15 minutes of misunderstanding after misunderstanding) fixed my flight.
I’m very grateful to these two women–Jennifer and the Delta representative. However, their employer, Travelocity, should be ashamed of itself. First of all, they should be properly trained so that they can deal with easy to fix problems–like mine–in something under the hour and a half that it took for them to figure out my minor problem.
I have a lot of sympathy for Jennifer. She was most likely working in India–where Travelocity has outsourced it’s call center. That means that she was dealing with ornery Americans for her shift which probably went from something like Midnight to 10am, her time.
I don’t really like dealing with pissy Americans ever! Imagine doing that on the night-shift. Regardless of her kind service, I’ll probably refrain from working with Travelocity again. Too many stories of nightmares out there for me.
I guess those were some pretty disjointed thoughts. I’ll try to come up with something more thought provoking and groundbreaking soon. But, until then, thanks for listening.
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Posted in life at 11:29 am by
Okay friends, I’ll let the cat out of the bag. We’re going back to the Carribean again this summer. If you were counting, that makes three trips in three short–but wonderful–years of marriage. I think you could call us junkies.
Lest you think that the Bad Christian household is ‘made of money’ allow me to explain. We’ve never actually paid for our lodging. The first trip was our honeymoon. We were given a generous gift of a week in a timeshare condo in St. Maarten. We stayed at the Flamingo Beach Resort. St. Maarten was probably our favourite trip thus far. The food on the island is unbelievable and if you have a rental car you can pretty safely go wherever you want and get there within an hour. It’s a small island, but lovely.
The next trip was to an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic. I used the hotel points and airline miles that I’d amassed at my job as a travelling salesperson of college educations to get us a free trip. We stayed at the Hamaca Coral Resort in Boca Chica. The Dominican isn’t St. Maarten, by any means. However, it was a great time.
Our upcoming trip was offered to us by the generous donation of my in-laws. We’ll be flying to the Turks and Caicos and staying on the island of Providenciales (aka Provo) for a week. We’ll stay at Beaches - Turks and Caicos. It sounds like a heavenly way to unwind from what has proven a long, hard year for Jen and I.
Anyway, believe it or not, all that was introduction. Here’s my beef.
Travelocity.
The folks at Delta cancelled the flight that I purchased. Should be no big deal, right? Right. Riiiight. It was a big deal. At 2:42 yesterday I got an email that said that I needed to call Travelocity right away, my flight reservation had changed. Turns out that my flight from Lansing to Cinncinati had been cancelled. However, I had been booked on a new flight.
So, I call Travelocity. Turns out the flight that I’d been booked on left lansing at 9:06 pm. This was problematic as my scheduled flight from Cinncinati to Atlanta left at 8:45pm. This is called a misconnect. The first gentleman I spoke with was certain that I needed to send my paper tickets back to the main Travelocity office in San Antonio so that I could be issued new tickets. I was assured that nothing could be done until I sent those paper tickets back. To accomplish the information transfer described above took around 20 minutes (most of that spent on hold.)
Well, I didn’t just want a paper ticket that would misconnect me, so I called travelocity back. This time I spoke with a woman named Jennifer. Nice woman. She informed me that the fellow I’d just spoken with for the past 20 minutes was, in fact, dead wrong about sending my paper tickets back. All I needed to do was show up at the airport. Great, I thought, now all we needed to do was deal with the misconnect.
Jennifer informed me that she would call Delta and set up a new flight for me. She put me on hold.
I don’t know if any of you have ever been on hold with Travelocity.com, but if you have been, you’re probably aware that their hold music is the sort that makes people go postal. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been on hold for, oh, say 10 or 15 minutes–but after 35 minutes of hold music I was about ready to start killing things.
At 40 minutes Jennifer came back on the line and informed me that the Delta representative was in on our call and would assist me. Great. Now something is going to happen, I thought. Well, long story short, the Delta agent (after about 15 minutes of misunderstanding after misunderstanding) fixed my flight.
I’m very grateful to these two women–Jennifer and the Delta representative. However, their employer, Travelocity, should be ashamed of itself. First of all, they should be properly trained so that they can deal with easy to fix problems–like mine–in something under the hour and a half that it took for them to figure out my minor problem.
I have a lot of sympathy for Jennifer. She was most likely working in India–where Travelocity has outsourced it’s call center. That means that she was dealing with ornery Americans for her shift which probably went from something like Midnight to 10am, her time.
I don’t really like dealing with pissy Americans ever! Imagine doing that on the night-shift. Regardless of her kind service, I’ll probably refrain from working with Travelocity again. Too many stories of nightmares out there for me.
I guess those were some pretty disjointed thoughts. I’ll try to come up with something more thought provoking and groundbreaking soon. But, until then, thanks for listening.
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Trackback URL »
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Streak said,
March 24, 2005 at 4:26 pm
Interesting. We have a similar story. A cousin was going to be married last summer so we bought tickets through Cheap Tickets or whatever. The tickets were with Frontier. well, long story, my cousin didn’t get married and I am sad for her because I think that was painful and she is great. So we have those tickets, right?
Wrong. To use them elsewhere we had to pay more money, which we were willing to do, but after two different attempts we decided to eat those original tickets. When my wife was dealing with them, she had the same experience with really well-meaning people at Cheap Tickets who were trying to help her, but the Frontier guy said directly that he didn’t understand why people went with those outfits. Sure, you save a few bucks, but he said when things don’t go perfectly, you find out what a pain they are. I have learned my lesson and will use those places as a search engine, but buy directly from the airlines. For what it is worth.
Travel Blog said,
March 31, 2005 at 8:04 pm
Travelocity Woes
A customer who’s fed up with Travelocity….
Dieter said,
May 24, 2005 at 4:53 pm
I am currently undergoing an nightmare situaiton with Travelocity. I needed to cancel a trip. Travelocity told me that I could get a credit for my tickets, but I would have to send back my paper tickets. HOWEVER, once one sends back paper tickets to Travelocity, the clock starts ticking: one has FIVE days to book a new trip.
I booked a new flight, but it didn’t confirm. I have called Travelocity every day to see if the flight has confirmed, and I am always told that I has not–after being on hold for 45-60 minutes. Each time I call, I am simply told that confirmation has been requested with the airline and Travelocity cannot do any more.
I still don’t understand why I was “sold” a ticket if there were not seats available in the first place. Surlely with computers and the internet (and the fact that I was sold the ticket by a live operator, not on the website), I could have been sold a valid ticket.
Now I am left calling every day and hoping that my ticket might confirm. Meanwhile, the “available” fares keep climbing and climbing, and I have even offered to pay more (within reason) for a confirmed seat, but it doesn’t matter. My ticket/confirmation request seems to have gone down a blackhole and no live human (at Travelocity or Lufthansa) can do anything more.
Patrick Riley said,
June 12, 2005 at 10:12 pm
Never used Travelocity… in fact, don’t even give them your credit card. they are sooooo bad…. They charged me a hotel that was cancelled, and I’ve been on hold with them for 2 hours now AFTER they said they had made a mistake and will be taking the steps to refund my money. AVOID THEM AT ALL COSTS. Also, remember… travel.yahoo.com (Yahoo Travel) is the same as Travelocity… that is, Yahoo uses the Travelocity system to order tickets, book hotels, etc. AVOID both Travelocity.com and travel.yahoo.com.