Here to help
You probably know what Melanie Frazier felt like when she recently tried to book a flight from Portland, Maine, to Atlanta.
She found a $257 fare — not a bad deal — but by the time she got around to booking the ticket online a few hours later, the price had risen to $441. Undeterred, she set up a fare alert through Google, and a week later, sure enough, the fare plunged to $246. Read more “Did your great airfare suddenly disappear? Blame “dynamic pricing.””
When Ana Maria Roque’s yoga app stops working, she calls this advocate for help. But can the problems with this nonworking program be untangled? Read more “Help, my Yoga app stopped working. Can you fix that?”
Alina Novak’s complaint had a familiar ring to it. While she was searching for an inexpensive round-trip ticket from Toronto to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on TripAdvisor.com, she stumbled upon a $177 airfare.
Read more “Are airlines pulling a bait-and-switch?”
Question: My wife, Gwen, and I bought a timeshare from Westgate last December. The location where we purchased was in Park City, Utah, but the week we ended up buying was in Arizona at another Westgate property. We had taken a free two-night stay with the agreement we would sit through a presentation at the end of the stay.
As you can imagine, it was a high pressure sales pitch and there were two people trying to get the sale. They offered us all sorts of incentives to get us to buy and they really seemed like quite a good deal.
Read more “Westgate promised, but did it deliver?”
Read more “Is this a cruise club bait-and-switch?”
Kim Gandy is an experienced traveler, and she’d like to think she wouldn’t fall for a scam. But when she tried to book a rental car through Hotwire recently, she thinks she may have been duped.
Read more “No, this isn’t a Hotwire bait-and-switch (or is it?)”
Now you see it. Now you don’t.
When you’re airfare shopping, attractive prices can vanish in a split second. Just ask Jim Doll, a systems engineer in Atlanta, who recently tried to buy a ticket to San Francisco on AirTran Airways’ Web site. He found a one-way fare for just $130, but by the time he’d toggled over to Orbitz.com to see if he could do better there and then clicked back, the price had changed.
Read more “The low airfare that vanishes in a click”
It just happened to me.
For years, I’ve patiently and dispassionately explained that when the price of your flight doubles while you’re making a reservation, it’s not bait-and-switch; it’s a function of the airline industry’s imponderable yield management software.
And yes, I’ve gotten the “I’m sorry, the fare is no longer available” message while I’ve tried to buy a flight online.
But never like this.
Read more “Hey Southwest, if this isn’t bait-and-switch then why does it feel that way?”
