“Travelocity Dot CON!”

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

38,000ft Over Fort Wayne, IN—(Weekly Hubris)—5/31/10—Travelocity.con. And, no, that’s not a typo.

As a travel writer who’s been recommending Travelocity, Expedia, Cheap Tickets, AirGorilla, etc., etc., and using them all, myself, for years, I’ve had it. Travelocity, for one, as a company, is broken in so many ways, I hardly know where to begin my litany of complaints, but consider this a “Dear John,” letter to the online-driven, cheap-airline-ticket-and-hotel-room-folks: See ya; woudn’t wanna be ya (or work for ya).

Working for you would involve moving to India, it appears.

My husband (aka The Devil Bat) and I returned from a demanding, six-week-long business junket to Greece (tickets wisely booked through Continental and my Greek travel agency), and had about a week to catch our breath before another trip, to Santa Fe. (I’m writing this aboard United Airlines 1261, where we’re currently about No. 25 in the Newark take-off queue.)

That we are in seats 13D and E at all comprises a miracle of perseverance. Travelocity, in their inscrutable wisdom, had changed our entire itinerary while we were in Greece, and we returned to discover (only because, by chance, I had triple-checked our online tickets) that they had us leaving Denver for Newark (on our return leg) before we had even arrived there from Santa Fe. (They’d changed our outgoing flights as well.)

Cognizant of certain laws of physics, I got on the phone, called Travelocity, and got “Sarah,” who said, “Berz cam be for to hep you.”

I responded, “Sarah, I can’t understand a word of what you’re saying,” [patently a lie, as I had got her name, or the intelligible ‘English-sounding’ name she’d assigned herself in Bombay, or Calcutta, or Delhi, or wherever she’s based].

“Sarri. Dis could please hep burr it in numb?” said Sarah.

I handed the phone to my husband, who listened in utter bafflement for about three minutes, uttering monosyllables, before handing the receiver back to me.

This back-and-forth went on for some time. Finally, I just ignored Sarah and gave her, slowly and clearly, the narrative of our Santa Fe trip incongruities and impossibilities, plus lots of conformation numbers and dates. Slowwwwwly.

“Sag bishno please behind toosh fan four to five minutes,” said Sarah. Brightly.

Forty-five minutes elapsed, during which recorded voices advised me that Travelocity always apprises customers of any snafus vis-à-vis their reservations—by e-mail—but that spam filters sometimes prevent the reception of these notices. Nice try, Travelocity, I thought: I received scads of Travelocity ads while in Greece’s vast outback, and one notification that our outgoing flights had been changed (rationally) by a few minutes or so, but no advisory of our having to leave Denver before we’d actually arrived there.

After about an hour of similar ads and provisos, I hung up and redialed, getting “Sean,” who was about as “Sean” as I am “Spyridoula” or “Svetlana.” Sean, aka, Sanjay, or Srijan, or Chander had more spunk and better English than “Sarah,” but he also had attitude.

I was pretty testy, myself, by now. It was about 7 p.m. the night before our departure, I’d undergone dental surgery all afternoon, and my blood sugar was on the floor. Dean, who by now had a Hound of the Baskervilles look in his eye, kept trying to snatch the phone from me.

“Sean,” I said, levelly, “Travelocity’s motto—you know, the maxim delivered by your disgusting little Roaming *&^%$ Garden Gnome on TV, goes something like, “Travelocity always works with their partners to get it right for you, every time,” or some such drivel and, at present, you’ve got us stranded in Denver on November 8, thousands of dollars poorer, and no one there amongst the ceramic garden gnomes seems willing or able to rectify the situation for us.

“I’ll be back in four to five minutes,” said Sean, and then, he, too, was gone for an hour, during which time, Dean and I, alternately, listened to a loop of Latin music that confined itself to a shortened, four-bar version of the a-a-b-a form (my jazz-musician-husband informed me): Noriega would have confessed to anything after 30 minutes of it.

I wanted to hang up again. Dean wouldn’t let me.

Finally, Sean returned, happily saying he’d fixed “our” problem. “I can fly you out of Santa Fe at 10 in the morning,” he veritably piped.

“No, Sean, you can’t. I’m going out there for a course, and it won’t conclude until the afternoon of the 8^th: hence, our original, carefully planned, evening-departure itinerary,” I snarled.

Dean—in Devil Bat mode—and I, on two extensions now, requested a SUPERVISOR.

“Peter,” then, eventually came on the line and, I swear, we talked to him, in succession, for two hours—maybe more.

“Peter” had a better head-set, much better English, and 30 IQ points on his underlings, but things got even battier on his watch, all that notwithstanding.

“The only solution I can see,” I pointed out, “is to fly us out the following day, November 9^th but, then, is Travelocity going to pick up the extra cost of another night at our Santa Fe hotel? After all, Travelocity dropped us in this soup.” [I had to explain that metaphor.]

Peter said no. At length. In many ways. The most Travelocity could do, would do, was give us a $50. voucher towards a future Travelocity package.

Hoping Peter might twig to the concept of irony, I said, “So, Peter, you actually envision us ever, after this saga, booking through Travelocity again?! I’d rather book with the Donner Party, or for a cruise on the Titanic, or as a teacher-along-for-the-ride on the Space &^%$ Shuttle!!!!!”

This barrage of pop culture flummoxed our sub-Continental middle manager, who began an endless liturgy—really, liturgy—of apologies. (Saving corporate face must be huge in Delhi.)

By this juncture in the proceedings, Dean had finally put down his head-set and I had been drained of all angst and anger. I tried to engage Peter, or whatever his name was, on a more human level.

“Peter, this is not your fault, or Sarah’s, or Sean’s. This problem emanates from rotting corporate ethics. Travelocity books a package, somehow screws up the package (I was praying Peter had taken a short course in US phrasal verbs), fails to inform the customer of the screw-up, and then adds insult to injury (US idioms, too) by compelling the client to pay for Travelocity’s errors in every conceivable way—including talking to three company reps, in India, for c. four hours.

(During my long waits on Sarah, Sean and Peter, I’d checked out the involved airlines’ websites—there were lots of seats available all evening on November 8^th; and I’d called our hotel: they, too, had availability, but could not divulge the rate Travelocity had charged us nor give us that same rate for an extra night.)

[Dear Reader, note well: this column was written well, well, well before Bernie Madoff, the Goldman Sachs debacle, and the BP “spill” (now there’s an understatement!). Years before Madoff, Sachs and BP, the words “corporate” and “ethics” had parted ways.]

“Peter,” I explained, “you have a problem. You can apologize till the cows come home (US idioms, again), but this is a matter of corporate ethics. As you’re probably a ‘supervisor,’ all I’m asking now is that the next time you sit down with your ‘superiors,’ you tell them that Travelocity has lost two customers—one, a travel writer—due to refusing to come up with $105. for an extra night at a hotel and for putting two unsuspecting, jet-lagged travelers through hours of torture-by-phone, aka Water-boarding For The Literate.”

He said he would take the matter up with his bosses. I said I would remove Travelocity from my travel website, www.GreeceTraveler.com. He said he was sorry. Again. I said I hoped that, wherever he was, he could go to work for a better outfit. I also said, “You’re in India, aren’t you?”

He said he was. To which I replied, “Then, you know what I mean when I say I’m going to go lie down in Savasana for about an hour.” He laughed.

So, here we are, now, at 38,000ft over Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The beverage cart has just gone by, grazing my elbow, and my Rollerball pen has just exploded all over my right hand. But we are, patently, on our way to Denver and, next time, I’m going to book everything, directly, myself, without involving a lying ceramic gnome of a middleman and three all-but-unintelligible sub-Continentals.

Oh, and by the way, once on board United, we found we had to pay an extra $44., each, if we wanted “extra”— read “enough”—legroom; and food, of any sort, would cost us $5. per box.

AND, our transport to Santa Fe, photo included here, with Dean making his way up the ramp, was enough to put us off making this particular trip again any time soon. The pilot was all of 12, as God is my witness; there were no WC’s on board; and the plane made Sky King’s Songbird—anyone out there remember Sky King, the Songbird, Penny, et al?—look like a 747.

PS Elizabeth is now a week out from micro endoscopic transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion, aka major back repair, thanks to the blessed Dr. Alfred T. Ogden; and, so, many of her upcoming Weekly Hubris columns will be re-runs of previous work. Thanks for your patience, Readers . . . and for yours, Yogis and Yoginis, who are awaiting her return to the mat-at-the-head-of-the-classroom.