June 14 — I sought to buy 3 airline tickets from Washington, DC that always involve a layover in a midwest city, as the final destination is a northern Michigan airport, Pellston, serviced by several airports around the midwest.
My bid to Priceline was for both legs of the trip, and my bid of $375 per ticket was slightly less than the current market price of $417 (the price of tickets had recently gone up from $340, so I thought perhaps Priceline owned a few at that lower price.
The Priceline.com website came back and asked if I could accept changing airports such that my departure airport would be a different in Washington DC (I had selected Dulles, it wanted Reagan National Airport), and if Detroit was acceptable also. I assume the Detroit question, being in the same sentence & line of the webpage as the departure airport question, was a similar refinement question of flying THROUGH Detroit versus Chicago or Lansing, etc. I said OK.
Priceline then accepted my bid. Next I was shocked to see that the tickets only contained flights to and from Detroit, and the portion of the trip to Pellston was cutoff. Round trip tickets to Detroit that day cost $180, so of course it was a great deal for Priceline— they got almost $600 free from me.
Pellston is five hours by car from Detroit. That's like a customer in Atlanta planning a vacation in New York, going to priceline.com, having the trip aborted at the layover in Richmond, VA, five hours from New York, with inference being, just stay in Richmond, or just drive and figure it out or take the bus.
After long phone calls, where the staff are obviously trained not to listen to the customer and only to cite the company policy of refusing to help, I made no headway.
I learned that flights to Pellston were available at Priceline. The company's rejection of my flights to Pellston was not that the company did not handle that particular market. Thus, Priceline.com easily could have turned down my bid.instead, and THIS IS CRITICAL, it has set up its web site to trick users like me to inadvertently drop off a portion of their trip, then to have an over-priced bid for a single-flight, short trip accepted at a ludicrously high price, advantageous to Priceline.
The only recourse offered was to buy another ticket from Priceline at an unreasonably high price. They offered a ticket to Pellston for about $800, when the market price that day $417. Hence, they were going to get the money they stole again no matter what. That's a scam any which way you look at it.
The priceline.com website is engineered to deceive customers, to conceal the fact that portions of trips are being DELETED, and then priceline.com takes the money and refuses to help.
I wrote the company a letter, faxed it to the headquarters, (their replies have been completely unresponsive), and have sent it to several regulatory authorities.
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