You know that they really do have a decent search engine and relatively easy to use bookings and all but God help you if you step out of that business model. You cannot correspond with them via email as they apparently want no paper trails and if you call, you are going to talk to someone you cannot understand who is probably in India. And that's after they thoroughly discourage you by leaving you on hold for 10 to 30 minutes.
I had a situation where I had an unused airline ticket on an airline (Olympic) that I will not use in the foreseeable future. The airline was very agreeable and told me (in email correspondence) that once Expedia returned the (paper) tickets to them they would happily refund the $126 in taxes on the unused fare. (Perhaps they already knew they’d never see it.)
Well about two months ago I did put them to task and called for the sixth time and sat down to a DVD and, after insisting to talk to a manager, actually waited on hold for over an hour. At that point, Mahatma came back on the line finally and said that all was taken care of with Olympic Air and that I should be expecting a check within a week’s time. Since then I have received an email asking me if I had the shipping/tracing information on the ticket return because they can’t find my tickets still – the ones they told me they received over a year ago.
Well I have submitted a complaint to the Michigan Attorney General’s office and now this. The saga continues…
My advice is that you do what I do and do your searching for prices and routings with these online brokers (they’re all the same, no doubt) but buy direct. If you go look up Expedia you’ll find that they really have several outlets including Hotels.com and other forms of sheep’s clothing – made in India.
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