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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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Harper’s have started posting a lot more of their content online. I wonder if this is connected to Lapham’s handing over editorial responsibility? Anyway, here’s an interesting piece on the mail order bride business:
Shyly, slyly, hopefully, the men around the table smiled; these damaged guys, so desperate to believe.
In one form or another, the so-called mail-order bride has been part of American life since colonial days. Even today, many of New Orleans’ older families claim to be descended from the “casket girls” Louis XV sent from France to wed Louisiana colonists in the early eighteenth century, the term derived from the chests the women were given to carry their few belongings. And although westerns and Harlequin novels have perhaps oversold the ubiquity of mail-order marriages on the frontier—much as the role of gunfighters in those days has been oversold—such unions, whether organized by religious groups or entrepreneurs, did take place throughout the pioneer era. Bachelor farmers wrote in search of wives not only to their support networks back East but all the way to the old country. The men’s magazines of the day advertised the services of marriage brokers right alongside ads for snake-oil miracle cures and such cutting-edge mechanical marvels as the chain-driven bicycle. In turn-of-the-century Chicago alone, police broke up as many as 125 fraudulent marriage agencies, seizing and burning “wagon loads” of photographs of fictitious brides.
During most of the twentieth century, however—what with manifest destiny having been achieved, and the focus of American life having shifted from mining camps and cattle ranges to cities, suburbs, and malls—the phenomenon all but died out, except for a small traffic, impossible to quantify, which seems to have focused on women from Southeast Asia. Companies like A Foreign Affair (AFA) have sprung up only since the mid-1990s, when their founders spotted vast opportunity in the contemporaneous collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of the Internet.
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Great article. Also has some good suggestions on local food production.
Global food is based on an economic theory: instead of producing a diverse range of food crops, every nation and region should specialise in one or two globally-traded commodities - those they can produce cheaply enough to compete with every other producer. The proceeds from exporting those commodities are then used to buy food for local consumption. According to the theory, everyone will benefit.
The theory, as it turns out, is wrong. Rather than providing universal benefits, the global food system has been a major cause of hunger and environmental destruction around the world.
The environment has been hit particularly hard. The global system demands centralised collection of tremendous quantities of single crops, leading to the creation of huge monocultures. Monocultures, in turn, require massive inputs of pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilisers. These practices systematically eliminate biodiversity from farmland, and lead to soil erosion, eutrophication of waterways, and the poisoning of surrounding ecosystems.
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