I am an exchange student in Germany who foolishly booked a flight through Govolo.com to Istanbul, where I was hoping to visit before my trip home. The site seemed legitimate, (like they all do) but still I knew that there is always risk involved when providing a credit card number over the internet.
The day after I booked the flight and the payment went through, I received an email at 11:00 am from bestatigung@de. Travel-agency. Travel (the english equivalent of which is confirmation@us. Travel-agency. Travel) asking me to send a photocopy of my credit card and passport by 5:00 pm, giving me a total of six hours to accomplish the task. This, supposedly, was to confirm my reservation. The email contained no indication that it was from govolo.com, or one of its international affiliates.
Naturally, I was a little leery of sending a photo of my credit card and passport to an email address that I did not recognize, especially because they had given me such an unreasonable deadline. I figured it was some sort of phishing scam not associated with govolo, so I did not send the information.
Instead, I inquired about canceling my flight on their website, to which they responded that I could do so (without a refund, of course) by sending a confirmation of my wish to cancel the flight to bestatigung@de. Travel-agency. Travel. I did not cancel, but I did google this suspicious, generic-sounding email address, and found a consumer complaint that described the same situation, and said that when he / she had gone to pick up their tickets, their reservation had been canceled.
I sent an email to govolo.com asking if my reservation was still intact, to which I received a computer-generated message that told me, very politely, that my reservation had been terminated. I lost over $300 with them.
I believe that by making their customers jump through so many hoops at such short notice, govolo.com intends to make it impossible to comply with their demands, in order for them to justify canceling reservations without refund.
The moral of the story is, research online businesses before you give them your money. It sounds obvious, but I got lazy, and paid the price.
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