I recently booked a trip with Orbitz that included air, hotel and ground transportation from airport to hotel and hotel to airport. Well, when you book the ground transportation, there are no options to choose where the shuttle takes you for your hotel. I assumed, like I guess many people do, that it actually takes you to the hotel you just booked on the exact same itinerary. Not so! If you look closely, in my case, it takes you from the Baltimore airport to downtown Baltimore, even though our hotel reservation was in Washington, D.C. We didn't discover this until we were in the Baltimore airport, slogging around our luggage, and attempted to redeem said voucher. Luckily, the Super Shuttle attendant was kind enough to exchange our useless voucher for one that would get us to our hotel, even though Orbitz states that the vouchers are non-refundable. Unfortunately, in our haste, I forgot to do the same for the return voucher. Once in our hotel, and ready to return to the airport, I was then unable to exchange or refund the voucher. I had to purchase a new, separate voucher for hotel to airport transportation.
I can hardly blame Super Shuttle, in this case, since it's the incredibly misleading Orbitz site that sold me the useless vouchers in the first place. I contacted Orbitz to seek a refund and they stated that they were unable to do so and to contact Super Shuttle. I told them I had already contacted Super Shuttle to no avail. They apologized and asked if there was anyting else they could do for me. Really?
We go on a vacation yearly that requires hotel/air/car rental, and I can tell you that I'm never using Orbitz again. Furthermore, I am passing this information on to my friends and family who book trip packages online. I may even tweet my displeasure with Orbitz.
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