Orbitz Mess
I recently purchased an airplane ticket through Orbitz for the first time and I know for sure this will be the last. All went smoothly in terms of getting the booking done, receiving their convenient notifications prior to departure (I always have trouble locating my e-tickets the day before my trip) and actually departing Toronto and getting to Lima. The problem arose when I wanted to change my return date and I fell into the bowels of their outsourced Customer Support department, out of which I emerged having spent hours on the phone with Orbitz representatives and having two unauthorized credit card transactions for over $1,200 for a change that never happened. I was quite honest and detailed in my feedback when I received a customer support questionnaire from them that same day I discovered their colossal mistake!
My first phone call with them was a little longer than I would have wished but I got the information that I needed. My ticket had a 30 day limit so to extend it by three weeks I would have to buy a new one-way ticket that they quoted me at around $500 (plus the $35 penalty) and cancel the return portion of the original. I considered my options and called back the next day to make the change. This is when the Customer Support ping-pong started. I went from one agent to the other, eventually being transferred to Sales because the agent told me that she couldn’t book a flight that originated in Lima, then being transferred back to Support because Sales said they don’t deal with changes, and back to Sales again. One hour later, I had gotten nowhere, no one could give me the same story I had received the day before and, in fact, I had no alternatives other than purchasing a new round trip ticket originating in Toronto (for at least twice the price of the one-way I had been quoted the day before) and I should call the airline to make sure I could only use the return portion. This all sounded pretty fishy to me and, besides, I could not justify buying a whole new ticket to extend my stay so I gave up on the idea and told them not to cancel anything, that I wasn’t making any new purchases.
A bit deflated from the experience, I decided to call the airline a few days later to check up on what their story was and, sure enough, they confirmed my suspicion that buying a return ticket and only using one portion was considered fraud.
A couple of days later my husband gets two credit card transactions from the day of my second conversation with Orbitz – one for $35 and one for $1180. We had used his credit card for the purchase so I was pretty sure I knew who the charges were from. I called Orbitz yet again and the agent confirmed that they had made the transactions but could not tell me what change they had made was and simply said they would investigate only once I faxed them a copy of my credit card statement. I explained to her that I was traveling in Peru and had no access to a fax nor to my printed statement and all I got was a reply out of a training guide: ‘We’re sorry for your inconvenience. We will investigate once you send us a fax.’ Trying to speak to a supervisor meant waiting on the phone for another half hour which I could not spare at the moment. I am now resorting to asking my credit card company to not process the unauthorized transactions, not trusting that I will be able to sort out this mess with Orbitz themselves given their original response. I just hope that I actually have a spot on my flight when I show up next week and that they haven’t confused things even more.
In my opinion, more than a solid user interface is required to run an online travel business. The follow up customer support stage is just as important. Orbitz has figured out the first in its over 5 years of operation but has lots of work to do on the second.
UPDATE, March 27: Over two months later, I am still dealing with never ending customer support conversations with Orbitz. Now I ask for a supervisor directly each time I call them, even though it takes between 45 minutes to an hour to get through to one and they are no more competent than the CSRs. Orbitz did an investigation and concluded that they had mistakenly upgraded my ticket but they still have not reversed the charges on my credit card as they now need to call Continental Airlines to finalize the details of what they need to do to amend this. Once they have sorted that our they said it would take between a week and 60 days to finally reverse the charges! Maybe by next Christmas I will have my money refunded! I will be relieved not to have to speak to an Orbitz CSR ever again after that.
This article was posted by Veronica Montero
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