Thursday, December 28, 2006
[Later edit - I just found out there's apparently a travel plan named "Velocity". This entry has nothing whatsoever to do with that.]
I just spent almost five hours trying to book a round-trip flight, hotel, and car for a visit to Florida in late January. I usually book everything separately, because I've found flights are usually cheaper booked directly through the airline web site than through any of those services, and the particular hotel I want usually isn't available in packages anyway. But I'm not above using Travelocity or whatever to do the searches.
Well, this time, it happened that I could get the hotel I wanted and a car in a package with the flight, and the total was in fact lower than booked separately (even though the flight was more expensive), so I went went ahead and booked the flight, hotel, and car on Travelocity.
Screen after screen after screen of nit-picking and verifying and detailing and registering and TOS to be read. Finally I got past the credit card verification screen, and got a screen that's blank except for where it says that my reservation is not yet complete because Travelocity is verifying my credit and "thou shalt not close this page before we complete verification or doom shall befall thee".
An hour later, that screen is still sitting there unchanged. Do I have a reservation or not? I have an email from Travelocity thanking me for registering, which was the last thing I did before this screen came up, but nothing about a reservation. Should I just shrug and start over? But then I could end up with two tickets, and painful nonrefundable cancellation nastinesses.
Dim memory of this exact thing happening to me about 18 months ago, when I was booking the flight to New Orleans. Same screen. Same staring nothingness.
I don't remember what the result was then.
So I called Travelocity.
After over a half an hour on hold, with the absolute worst music ever - I think it was supposed to sound Mexican fiesta-like, but it was 4 bars of very loud fast jangling, repeated endlessly over and over until I wanted to scream - I finally got to an agent. I told her she should tie down one of their public relations people and feed 'em this hold music crap through headphones for a few hundred repetitions, and then they'd understand why customers are so angry when they finally get to an agent. They need nice soothing classical music.
I explained what happened with the website, and she PUT ME ON HOLD AGAIN - that "music" again, 4 brain-beating bars over and over and over - and then came back to say there was no reservation, but she could do it for me now. I said ok. Again with all the minute details, and the repetition, and the verifying, and more repetition, and finally just short of an hour later it was done.
She sent me an email a few minutes later with all the details.
Travelocity had added on a fee for "phone reservations".
Let's see now. I call to report that their website doesn't work, they offer to fix things. They didn't tell me they are going to charge me a fee to compensate for my inconvenience... or was it their inconvenience... I'm confused....
I'm pissed.
5 comments:
Amazing but true - I was on hold with Travelocity yesterday and handed the phone to Robin, my cubemate, so she could hear the awful music. What WAS that? Was that flamenco music on a steel guitar? Was it pushed through a distorted amp? We seriously discussed the possibility that they were trying to reduce their high call volume by playing bad hold music.
Oh, yeah, I agree with "bad amp" (the higher notes were piercing), and I also had the thought that they were trying to make callers go away. The music was extremely loud, and then when a voice broke in ("Thank you for holding" etc.)it was so soft that you didn't dare turn down the volume for fear of missing when an agent actually came on. I can believe that they purposely speeded the music up to jangle nerves.
NOBODY could possibly have said
"Let's play this music to soothe and entertain our customers while they wait", so what was their motive?
I usually resort to direct airline sites and Expedia... who one time let me cancel nonrefundable tickets for free b/c I called in 24 hours. What frustrates me is that if you want to do a tour of places, stopping off to see friends along the way, there's never a good way to get a good deal on one-way fares from city to city even though you're making more bookings.
Kate - Well, that's what you get for having friends all over the place, you floozy you!
Aspiring to be a floozy.
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