Travel Troubleshooter: Travelocity's slow response

Question:

I'm having a problem with a long-overdue refund for an online booking. I don't know what to do.

I bought three airline tickets from Miami to Johannesburg, South Africa, through Travelocity. The trouble started soon after I made my purchase. A Travelocity representative phoned me to say that the price of my ticket had gone up overnight, and that he needed my permission to charge more on my credit card.

Later that day, I received another call from Travelocity. My credit card was invalid, the representative said. Did I have another card I could use?

After this phone call, I checked to be sure the charges on my first card were canceled. They weren't. The charges added up to more than $12,000.

I tried to cancel the charges on my first card, but was told that only Travelocity could do that. I tried to cancel the charges on the second one, and got the same answer. I now had a total of nine transactions authorized and pending. I was getting heart palpitations.

It's been several months, and I've literally lost days of work trying to resolve this. So far, Travelocity has removed some of the charges, but not all of them. The problem is that Travelocity believes the airlines made some errors, and as a result, there are three charges of $1,414 each, plus service fees of $33.

Please help.

- S.M., Fort Pierce, Fla.

Answer:

Travelocity should have charged your card once. Any other billings should have been refunded immediately.

I'm troubled by what happened to you. First, because your online travel agent contacted you to say the price had changed. That shouldn't have happened. Travelocity's service guarantee promises that everything about your booking will be right, and the company has gotten a lot of mileage from a story about how it honored airfares that were obviously wrong.

A few years ago, Travelocity posted an erroneous fare of zero for tickets to Fiji. Instead of canceling them, it confirmed the tickets, at a cost of about $2 million. Anyone who hears this often-repeated story or reads Travelocity's "guarantee" (

» READ MORE: http://leisure.travelocity.com/Promotions/0

,,TRAVELOCITY%7c4818%7Cmkt_main,00.html) would probably think that when Travelocity quotes a fare, it will honor the price.

That didn't happen for you.

I'm also concerned with the pace of your refunds. Travelocity blamed the delays on the airlines, by your account. In order to process your refund, your online agency had to figure out who should have billed you and who shouldn't have. That line of reasoning makes perfect sense if you're Travelocity. A business shouldn't be forced to refund money that it doesn't have.

But it makes no sense from a customer's perspective.

One reason you work with an online agent is to prevent something like this from happening in the first place. You've paid Travelocity a booking fee because there's a value in the service it offers. And part of that service is that it's an intermediary - and if necessary, an advocate - for you.

If you ever run into trouble with Travelocity again, consider appealing to a manager. (I list a few of them on my Web site,

» READ MORE: www.elliott.org/help/travelocity

). The company's executives are remarkably responsive.

I contacted Travelocity, and it promptly refunded the three remaining charges.