I recently purchased tickets from San Francisco to Fiji, for a vacation. As most know, we cross over the international date line right before Fiji, which adds a full day to the date at the destination. Cheap Tickets’ itinerary did not reflect this date change. I consider this to be as basic as it gets for the travel industry. According to the itinerary, I was supposed to land on Tuesday and then, 7 hours later, fly on to Vanuatu on a smaller, local airline. There’s only one way to get to Vanuatu and the flights are only on Tuesdays and Saturdays. I had reservations for a very nice apartment on Vanuatu starting Tuesday, for 7 nights. As we were taxiing to the gate in Fiji, the flight attendant, of course, announced that it was WEDNESDAY. I had completely missed my plane the day before due to this huge error on the itinerary and lost $700 in the apartment reservation, due the lodge’s cancellation policy.
In the end, I could have accepted this mistake but when I called CT, they took ZERO responsibility for this error. Several of the customer service agents didn’t even know about the international date line so were unable to understand where the problem was or what error had been made.
I had to call several times and escalate several times. I encountered plenty of excuses, can’t - do attitudes, brick walls. I was told over and over that there was nothing they could do for me. After several hours of aggravation on the phone, the best I had been offered was an insulting $45 “goodwill” gesture. Urrrrggg…The company has absolutely no process in place for complaints, customer service is very circular and the training of the agents is atrocious.
I eventually got a refund of my $700 but I had to fight tooth-and-nail to get it and no valued customer should ever be treated this way, after losing a large sum of money due to someone else’s mistake.
I have sent a 14-page letter to Mr. Barney Harford, President of CT. We’ll see if there’s any response at all.
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