If you are traveling anywhere for business or leisure in the future I have a consumer warning for you about cheaptickets.com. Their customer service is awful and they will do nothing to remedy the errors that they make.
Here is my story:
I work at a wholesale company in San Diego and one of our customers won a contest for a trip to Las Vegas. I was put in charge of booking the trip and decided to purchase a package trip through cheaptickets.com. Originally I requested a flight out of San Diego and their website changed the origin location to the airport in Carlsbad. Unfortunately, this wasnt completely clear in their confirmation process and I was given flights that left from the wrong location.
I called their customer service to see if this could be fixed and was told that they are unable to change origin and destination locations. Since the error was partially mine, I can accept this. This is not my complaint. I decided that I would change the times of the flights to make them more convenient for the winner of the contest and I asked for non-stop flights. The customer service representative told me that he was able to give me a non-stop flight to Las Vegas but the return flight would have a layover. I told him that this was acceptable and I appreciated his help. The goal for me was to make this trip the most enjoyable vacation possible for our customer. The policy of cheaptickets.com is to review the flight arrangements before they are finalized and to have the customer agree to them. He iterated that I had a non-stop flight to Las Vegas and a layover flight on return. I confirmed.
Over the weekend, I received the e-mail confirmation for the revised flights, and much to my surprise, they reflected a layover on both flights. I called their customer service center and spoke to a supervisor after the initial person I spoke with provided no help. The supervisor refused to fix the error and repeatedly told me that there was no way that the representative that I spoke to was at fault. She said that, in fact, there are no non-stop flights between Carlsbad and Las Vegas. I told her that this boiled down to her employee giving me false information and it was the responsibility of cheaptickets.com to fix the problem. Still, they offered no help. They told me that they would not cover the costs of any further changes to the flights. I spent ninety minutes on the phone and received zero compensation for my troubles.
Here's the bottom line: the package cost $915 and the erroneous modifications to the flights cost $510. Further changes to the flights would cost an additional $510 and would not be taken care of by cheaptickets.com even though they are 100% at fault for the bookings being incorrect.
I hope this letter acts as a warning to any people considering using their service. I implore anyone reading this to NEVER use cheaptickets.com.
Thanks for reading and please forward this to everyone in your address book so that we can get the message to this company that consumers will not be taken advantage of.
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