It’s been two years since Niel Bratteli bought a roundtrip plane ticket from Dallas to Boston for his son. The airline, ATA, stopped flying from Boston to Dallas and his online travel agency, Travelocity, promised Bratteli a refund. But countless calls and e-mails later, there’s no sign of the money. What’s wrong?
TRAVELOCITY
Mandatory resort fees, as everyone knows by now, are completely evil. But do the avaricious hotels that charge them have a partner in crime? Yes, they do.
There’s bad news for anyone who is considering booking a trip online: the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index from the University of Michigan finds customer satisfaction has fallen to an all-time low. The online travel industry’s aggregate scored slipped from 76 to 75 last year, a drop of 1.3 percent. It’s the lowest reading since the ACSI began tracking online travel agencies in 2002.
Here’s an important footnote to the airline industry’s year from hell. A closer look at the Transportation Department’s 2007 report card shows some carriers were likelier to lose your luggage, deny you boarding, get you to your destination late and provoke a written complaint. And some airlines were above it all.
Travelocity has come a long way in a short amount of time. Not so long ago, I was inundated by service complaints (some the result of communication issues between outsourced agents for whom English wasn’t a first language, but others the result of apparent negligence). After adopting a service guarantee recently, however, the agency has made a remarkable turnaround.
