Travelocity lost the tickets that I bought from them.

Now, given Travelocity’s customer service guarantee:

the Travelocity Guarantee is our commitment to you that everything about your booking will be right, or we’ll work with our partners to make it right, right away… Human error happens; nobody’s perfect - but in those rare cases that we make a mistake you can count on us to take responsibility for it.

…you might expect that they graciously accepted responsibility, and issued me a new set of tickets, right? Wrong. Travelocity’s best solution is that I “arrive at the airport one or two hours earlier than usual, file a ‘lost ticket claim’ form, and pay either a fee (around $100) or the full price of the tickets,” which they would refund later, once I’ve sent them the receipts (so, 4-12 weeks later.)

This, to me, is bullshit. I have spoken to 4 supervisors in the past week on the phone, all of whom apparently are using the same customer service script, and have emailed their “guarantee” division of their customer service department multiple times, only to receive a form reply back (after three to four hours) containing identical paragraphs, and absolutely no offer to make right. None of the people I spoke to seemed to care in the least; all were obviously members of an outsourced call center, probably receive less than $10/hr, and probably speak to dozens or hundreds of angry customers a day - why should they care?

The amazing thing is that a similar thing happened to me recently with Orbitz (who also suck) - an hour after receiving the ticket confirmation email, I received an email saying the tickets could not be reserved, that my credit card would not be charged, and to please try again. I did. Orbitz charged me anyway, and I went through perhaps 8 people on the phone before I even found somebody willing to agree that it was their fault (one customer service lady even told me that I “should have ignored the second email,” i.e. the one received an hour after the confirmation, telling me that my credit card would not be charged.) They offered to apply the ticket value to a future purchase with Continental, and a $50 discount on future transactions with Orbitz. Since the whole point of using these sites is to compare prices across airlines, I replied back threatening legal action, and they eventually folded — hanging on to my money for a further 14 days, and needing two emails before it finally showed up again in my account.

What is the problem with these companies? Here’s my theory - they’re concerned (obviously) about the bottom line. Because of that, they don’t pay as well as they could; their Sr people migrate over time to better paying positions. They outsource, temp, and contract out work where possible; these people do not really care about the company and provide lousy service and product. Since they pay so low, the full time hires they do make are Jr to mid level. Bugs creep into the system. Morale falls. Customers are just a pain in the ass to deal with.

Anyway, enough of a rant. My message is simply this: don’t use Travelocity, and don’t use Orbitz. If everything goes right, you’ll be OK, but they suck when things go wrong.

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