fun with orbitz
Categories: life
No Comments »
I usually buy all of my airline tickets using expedia.com, but for my upcoming trip to Japan, my mom asked me to try out orbitz.com. Well, it wasn’t a pretty experience. When I found my flight and tried to enter my purchasing info through orbitz, the page refreshed itself while I was looking for my frequent flier program number. It wiped out all the info that I had inputted at that point. Very annoying — why did they put a http refresh on a lengthy form page anyways?
Then after I filled out the form again and clicked purchase, I was told that the flight was sold out and that my transaction has been cancelled. I was ticked. I wasted a good 15 minutes filling out the forms, and that flight was at a great price at a great time.
So I gave up and hopped over to expedia.com. I found the same flight at the same time. Less than 100 seconds later, I had it purcahsed with a ticket receipt in my e-mail box from expedia. Usually airlines allocate batches of seats to various travel agencies so even if a flight is filled on orbitz, another agency, like expedia, might still have seats open.
But that’s not the end of the story. My credit card company called me early this morning to tell me that orbitz double-charged my credit card. For a ticket that I didn’t even receive. After some complaining, it will take orbitz two weeks to give me credit back on my credit card — unfortunately, a double-charged plane ticket to Tokyo plus my real ticket puts me over my credit limit, but my credit card company was nice enough to extend my limit for the time being.
So basically, out of all the heartless companies I had to deal with — Microsoft (Expedia), my bank (credit card), and Orbitz, Orbitz was the most clueless and un-userfriendly of them all. Pitiful since Microsoft and my bank are generally fairly bad.
