- I had to cancel two Air Canada tickets to London. I had also bought lounge access. The agent on the phone refunded the lounge access immediately but the refund of the tickets did not show up, even after weeks. I looked on Air Canada’s website and they said to contact them if you do not receive refunds within 10 days – so I did. The phone was busy so I tried email, quoting the ticket numbers.

I received a response stating that the tickets had already been refunded. I emailed back and explained that those refunds were actually for lounge access and not for the actual tickets. I received a response shortly thereafter confirming the correct amounts of refund – once I had pointed out to her what had gone on.

I received credit on my credit card statement a few days later.

There was an issue, but there was obviously a helpfup person who does have common sense on the other end of the line at Air Canada and it got resolved very quickly once I pursued the recommended avenue. It took only a couple of hours really.

It blows me away how these seemingly simple issues have to go all the way to Chris – but at the same time, I am glad he is there because in some places, there is a lack of common sense and someone who is excellant at these things is needed – and Chris is top notch.

Living here in Silicon Valley, the heavily accented Indian accent now sounds like regular English to me. Call centers are aren’t problem for me except that the folks there are very script oriented. They have trouble deviating from the script. I wonder why? Poor training perhaps?

Not only will I NOT deal with these 3rd party agencies but I have stopped dealing with any company that uses the India call centers. Most of the time I can not understand their version of the English language but they are no better than monkies reading a script off of their computer screen.

I understand it is cost effective to use them and it has limited many of the firms that I use but I perfer speaking to a person that I can understand. I speak 3 languages but heavily accented Indian/English is not of of them. I don’t think I am a bigot, just a tired consumer who wishes that people llike Chris were no longer needed.

To be honest, in this case, couldn’t someone at the airline have done the same thing if they had booked directly with the airline? There are technical glitches everywhere, not just on third party sites.

Are they that much less expensive?

In some cases, sadly yes. Not to mention one doesn’t really hear this happen often, especially if one maybe does a Google or Bing search.

If travel providers were to maybe share how many called to complain of issues like this versus how many bought tickets and didn’t have issues, the results might be…interesting to say the least.

Meaning… AA is refunding $346 X 4 tickets – $75 Cancellation per ticket = $1086

But wait! There’s more…

Travelocity is refunding the $75 per ticket, so…

$1086(AA) + $300 ($75×4) = $1384.

TADA!

Though, I agree with most of the posters here, I would have gotten my CC company involved from the beginning.

Of course Bley’s Travel Agent said to try calling Chris – if Bley booked on Travelocity, there’s nothing his/her Travel Agent can do with that. S/he can’t see the record and does not work for Travelocity. Had Bley booked with his/her Travel Agent, the TA would have been responsible and then could have done something with it. In the meantime – took almost a year with Chris’s help anyway….

While I can understand why, after so much effort to get it resolved, the OP agreed to pay the $75 change fee, that was a wrong decision. That just serves to perpetuate the problem, and motivates companies like Travelocity to NOT resolve their invalid charges quickly. Heck not only did they get to keep a substantial chunk of money that didn’t belong to them for a very long time, but they were going to make a profit of $300 for THEIR screw-up! And this customer was letting them! Good thing Christopher stepped in and cleaned that up.

If customers will simply quickly dispute clearcut mistakes with their credit card companies, and then leave it to the companies to sort out, that will provide the motivation to the merchants to resolve these cases quickly. Trust me, the credit card company is NOT going to allow Travelocity to keep THEIR thousands of dollars for months at a time!

This is not meant by any stretch of the imagination to discount what Christopher did here. It sounds like, by the time the OP contacted him, too much time had already gone by to involve the credit card company. They do have a time limit. At that point, Christopher really WAS their only option.

So the lesson here is: PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR BILLS! And if you get a fraudulent charge, DISPUTE IT, provide adequate documentation to prove your dispute, and let the companies involved hash it out.

One final note: to all the people in here saying they’d never use Travelocity – sometimes you DO get a better deal from these online agencies IF you are buying a package – air, room, car. I have seen a number of situations in which purchasing each of those items separately is more expensive than buying as a package from Travelocity or Expedia. So it’s entirely possible that’s what this OP was doing. However, I have to agree that if you’re talking strictly about flights, there is simply no reason to not go directly to the airline. I have never seen a flight at a lower price on one of the online agencies than I could purchase from the airline directly.