How to handle online travel purchases gone bad
Call for help
If your travel site doesn’t work, try someone whose system does — such as a travel agent. “In most cases a real travel agent can check the price to see if it’s available and also book it at the same price,” says Bruce Fisher, Honolulu-based operator of a vacation package site, Hawaii-Aloha.com.
A competent agent understands the perils of booking online and can often price-match. What’s more, their systems can be faster and more reliable than the one you’re using to buy your trip. It’s worth noting that the advice isn’t free — agents charge a booking fee for their services.
Take your best shot
If you find a price online and try to buy it, but are denied, your first step is to gather evidence. “Take a screen shot of the page with the fare you were promised and contact the travel site,” says Damian Bazadona, president of Situation Interactive, a New York marketing agency.
“Most consumers assume that if it’s an online service they can’t speak to someone. That’s not the case.” He’s right. I’ve seen travelers prevail in a dispute with a travel company or bank because they had screen shots.
Cite the law
I’m not going to go into details about how to complain to a travel company — I have a section on my blog dedicated to that — but I would add one thing: In addition to a brief, polite e-mail with your screen shots, it may help to cite any laws that apply to your situation.
For example, the Federal Trade Commission has a useful guide on bait advertising with chapter and verse of applicable federal law. (Bait advertising is an alluring but insincere offer to sell a product the advertiser in truth does not intend to sell.) If a company thinks it’s breaking the law, it is far likelier to see things your way.
Wait
Online agencies and reservations systems are aware of the problem and are working to fix it, says Pablo O’Brien, the general manager of Yahoo! Travel. Users should expect “gradual improvement in system performance,” he told me.
Those much-needed upgrades will allow travel companies to rely less on a process called “caching” — or storing potentially outdated prices on their servers, where customers can access them. But the fixes won’t happen overnight.
I had a lengthy conversation with a representative from Amadeus, one of the companies that handles reservations, and came away with the impression that the technology already exists to eliminate most of these problems. I also felt that a few common-sense strategies such as the ones I just mentioned could prevent most of these booking snafus.
Common sense and a little tech savvy are also important. “If a traveler uses their browser’s back button, they are essentially going back to an old display, not a refreshed display,” explained Alix Arguelles, director of product management and support services for Amadeus. “Browsers settings should be set for ‘refresh every time’ to help guarantee fresh data.”
But I’m not sure this problem will vanish any time soon. In addition to the conspiracy theorists who believe these system “troubles” are a thinly-veiled money grab, there are people on the other side who think the current reservations systems and the Web sites that book travel through them work just fine, thank you very much.
Alex Bainbridge, a UK-based travel technology consultant, capably represented that point of view when he called these issues a “minor inconvenience” that would be too expensive to repair. “People should get on with their lives and be grateful that affordable flights exist,” he said.
Maybe he has a point. Maybe we should just shut up and travel.
Or not.
