Travelocity(not)the_bomb

Ok - I had a request for the Travelocity story and why they suck.  It's not terribly interesting, really.  But - here goes!!  Ok - so I've always thought it would be awesome to go to New England in the Fall.  I love the Autumn.  No, I mean LOVE it!  It's beautiful.  I wrote a poem about the fall in college and it was one of the only ones I managed to get published in their creative writing journal.

Anyhoo!  Off track a little, but finding my way back on.... so.  I have a timeshare that I've been trading out for the past few years - to go to other places (you can really only go to Mesquite so many times before you want to rip your 105 degree hot hair out).  You can also buy bonus weeks.  And that's what I did.  I bought a bonus week at a resort in The Berkshires, MA.  Vermont or Maine would have been my first/second choices...but, alas - time share owners only tend to free up their lamer properties (again, I'm trading out Mesquite, NV here, people!!)  I booked waaaaay in advance.  And the flights I originally booked had me landing in Albany, NY (the closest airport to Lee, MA) by 5pm.  I figured 5 was a good time, check in, still have time for dinner and looking around and what not.  My flight home, I scheduled for 3pm.  We'd get home late, but we also wouldn't be rushed that day to get to the airport and I just thought that'd be perfect.

So - I'm set!!  Or so I think.  A few months down the road I get a notice from Travelocity that the airline has changed the flights and to please call them.  I call and they tell me that one of my connections won't work, so they're switching it to something else, but that I'll be arriving in Albany around the same time.  I think it was like an hour later or something.  No big.  I check a week or so later on "My trips" on Travelocity.com and see that they are still showing my old flight there.  I try e-mailing them to see if they can update my account.  They send me some blanket, lame-o response e-mail and basically tell me that they can only help if I call.  Any guesses on the average wait time to Travelocity customer service??  Well, it's long.  Ridiculously so.  I waited over an hour one time, just to talk to a human, on a previous reservation....I won't go there...missed my flight on that one, but anyhow!  (and why did I book another flight with them...short term memory loss?)

I hear my mother telling me, "In ten words or less, Donea!"  Well, to make a long story longer - I called and e-mailed them A LOT just to get my records updated.  How can I keep track if they don't have the correct flight info on file?  Well, they just kept telling me that it was right.  They had Delta send me a copy of the itin, which was different than my file with Travelocity.  But...at some point that "correct" file got lost in the shuffle and when I called AGAIN the only out-going flight they could accommodate me with left at 8:30am, landed at JFK at 3:00pm and flew out to Albany at 9:48pm...landing after 11pm.  11-frickin' PM!!

We got to our resort at almost 1am.  Security had to let us in.  To the wrong room, btw.  I'd bought a 2 bedroom for 6 people.  They had us in a 1 bedroom....anyhow, different drama.

Also - when I went to Delta.com to check-in 24 hours before I left...I still had not e-ticket.  I had to call Travelocity again!!  And I also found out at that time that there was a problem with our return flight as well, that they never ever bothered to contact me about.  They had to re-accommodate me again - and my return flight went from a 3pm departure to 7:05AM.  Ummm...seriously?

Not to mention that I also checked on that flight the day before we came home and found that it ALSO did NOT have an e-ticket attached to the reservation.  The lady with Continental airlines told me this on the phone.  I called Travelocity and talked to one rep who told me that she saw the reservation just fine and that the reason I couldn't find the e-ticket on Continental.com was because I was flying out with Continental connect...or some crap like that.  I told her what the Continental rep had said and she just told me everything was fine, fixed, blah.  So - I went back onto Continental.com and just tried to find the reservation with the e-ticket # that should have worked.  Still - nothing.  I called Travelocity AGAIN and told some other rep the same thing and he treated me like I was crazy.

I show up at the airport early, early in the morning and guess what?  No tickets.  It took another continental rep at the check-in desk nearly an hour to try to get it fixed for us, with NO help from Travelocity!!  I tried calling them, while she was trying to help us and he just put us on hold the whole time.  When he finally did come back on - he told me, "Sorry - can't help.  You'll have to deal with the airlines."

My daughter and husband and I had to sit by strangers on the way home because the end result only got us seats on the plane, but not together...

Do you know the Travelocity motto?  (or "guarantee" as they like to call it)  "We'll get with our partners to make your trip right, right now!"  Ummm- I'm calling Bull Sh*t!  I must have called and e-mailed them twenty or more times...they still never got the right reservation info on "my trips" online and they offered no sort of apologies or compensation for all their screw-ups.  They suck, suck, suck, suck, suck.

I found this doofus picture of Travelocity's roaming gnome:



I thought it was a good representation of the customer service reps he advertises for.  Or falsly so... I wonder where his chipper little English accent is supposed to come from.  Because that's not at all what I hear when I call...... out-sourcing at it's worst.