So if you have ready any of the previous posts on this blog then you realize that my friends and I booked our trip thru Travelocity...they shall now and forever be known as Travelcrapsity.
It all started as one Friday morning I was sititng at work and I received an email from Travelocity advising me that the airline had not confirmed my reservation for my trip to Dublin and therefore they were no longer holding any reservations for me. WTF!!!! I booked the trip over a month ago. How can my reservation now be no longer reserved? You know what this email caused...immediate freak out mode. Being the level headed person I am I casually walked away from my desk at work to make a personal call to find out what the hell happened. I am on hold in a queue on the toll free number for approximately 8-10 minutes when I hear someone pick up & when I say hello they hung up on me. Oh my god they totally didn't just do that. Now I'm freaking out & in the beginning stages of being pissed off.
I call Bettina & get her voicemail. I left her a message telling here that I needed to be talked off the ledge & that she needed to immediately check her emails too. Then I texted Tracy & let her know that some bad voodoo was going down. Since I received no immediate response from anyone I did the next logical thing. I went home to take care of business. Upon arriving home I called Travelcrapsity again. This time a guy by the name of "Alvis" answered my call. He informed me that what had actually happened was that the 1st leg of my return trip (Dublin to London) had been cancelled by the airline. Well alright, that can be fixed easily enough. My mind is put at ease. Alvis tells me "I vill have to put you on hold for two to tree minutes" (yes I realize it looks like I misspelled easy words, but I didn't...that is really just how he sounded. You have to imagine Aboo from the Simpsons when you read that line). So Alvis puts me on hold & when he comes back he tells me he has an option for me. This was it. He suggests that we fly from Dublin to Frankfurt to London. Seriously, he suggested that we fly over London & into Germany in order to have a lay over to get to our lay over connection. I told him that would not work as that made no sense as a solution. Alvis then asked me what my destination was. I asked him if he was looking at his computer because if he was then he would have realized that my destination was home, America, AZ...not London. He then told me that he was from Mumbai and apologized if he didn't understand what I needed him to do. I asked Alvis for his manager as I didn't feel that his location should have effected his ability to provide customer service. Alvis refused. He also then refused to look for any other potential solutions. At this point you have to realize that I have been on the phone with him for at least 30 minutes. I am losing my cool faster than Lindsay Lohan can down a bottle of vodka in the morning. He puts me on hold again for some reason that I have no idea & when he got back on the line my temper had boiled over for what will be the first time for the day. I maaaaaaaay have told him that I didn't care if he was a friggen camel jockey or just plain stupid, and that he needed to pull his head out of his ass & start using it to come up with a solution. Lets just say he never came up with a solution so I told him to do nothing more, to not even try to do anything since I figured he would be good at that.
I then call Bettina back again. This time she answers & tells me that she got the same email & that she had also just had a very unproductive conversation with another Travelcrapsity customer dis-service representative. My blood is still boiling & I'm fairly positive my blood pressure was through the roof. Instead of trying to coordinate the different answers Bettina & I were getting we decide that I would just go over to Bettina's house to make 1 phone call for all of us.
Okay I'm just going to put this out there as a pre-warning. I probably was not the best idea to have me as the one making the call to Travelcrapsity. That having been said I did make the call. I can't even tell you the dis-service representative that spoke with's name. I just know that I could not understand a friggen word she said. Initially she told me that there was nothing wrong with any of our bookings & when I insisted that I had received an email to the contrary she put me on hold for "two to three minutes" and came back on the line to inform me of the exact same thing I had told her I was calling to fix in the first place. Okay deep breath while she again puts me on hold for "one to two minutes" to find an option. This time she comes back with the following "option" we can fly from Dublin to Dusseldorf to London to New Jersey to Charlotte to home. When she asked if that was acceptable I said no it was unacceptable. This woman (who by the way totaly sounded like a man) had enough audacity to ask me if I didn't want to rebook then why was I calling & "wasting her time" yes, she actually told me I was wasting her time because I rejected the offer for a flight with 4 different layovers. I asked if she could just rebook the section of our flights that had been cancelled. I am now yelling at the top of my lungs. Thank goodness Bettina & her son were in the room cracking up, otherwise i would have freaked out even more. As it was I made Bettina take over the call so I could literally walk out of the room.
We had to be placed on hold again, this time so we could be conferenced in with Luftahansa Air. Oh happy day. The absolutely amazing & wonderful woman from Luftahansa not only spoke english, she knew exactly what we were asking as a solution to the problem. During the process of rebooking the initial leg for each of our reservations even the Lufthasana lady was growing frustrated with the complete lack of ability and understanding of basic job requirements from the Travelcrapsity lady. In the end what we found out is that the flight had in fact never been cancelled. What happened was that one airline merged with another & as a result the TSA required a new flight number. 2 hours later we have rebooked the initial leg of the return trip to have exactly what we started out with in the first place. Thanks to Travelcrapsity for catching their friggen error & just fixing things vs cancelling out our flights.
Bottom line folks, pay a little more & book somehwere...anywhere else than with Travelcrapsity unless you like to have gray hair & heartburn.
so...30 days and counting!!!
