Skip to main content

I Am Going To Boycott Travelocity, And Not Because I Hate The Gnome

I do hate the annoying gnome, but that's not the reason.
We (my wife and I) just had a very strange and unpleasant experience with online booking through Travelocity. It started in a pretty normal way—on Friday she booked a flight for her father, who doesn't have a computer, so she usually does it for him, I printed the e-ticket, put it into an envelope, mailed it to Cincinnati, where he resides, and we went on with our life.
That wasn't it, though. Next day, in the evening, my cellphone starts ringing, I cross the room to pick it up, it stops. Missed call. From... let me see... a person named "0050". Not that I know anybody by that name, and no voicemail message left. Whatever. Back to dinner.
Three hours later I go to the computer to check email, to find three messages from memberservices@travelocity.com
First message - at 6PM (about 24 hours after original booking):
1."...For the protection of our valued customers, all reservations are subject to review by our Revenue Protection Department, which requires the actual credit cardholder to contact our agents for additional information or verbal authorization...Your reservation is subject to cancellation..."
Second and third messages - both at exactly 7:51PM:
2."...We are unable to complete the processing of the reservation you made on our system, until we can obtain some additional information from you..."
3."...Thank you for booking your travel reservations with Travelocity.com...Our Revenue Protection Department previously had either contacted you by phone or emailed you requesting that you contact us. Unfortunately we have not heard from you and we have canceled your reservation due to lack of verifiable information..."
Apparently, the call from that 0050 gnome was not the one to miss.
I called Travelocity, and got through the maze of menus, and was put on hold and demanded explanation from someone with undecipherable English, and was transferred to another someone, whose first words to me were (I kid you not) "Who is this?" By that time I was not even yelling, I was more like hissing, but at no avail, cancelled reservations can not be reinstated, and so on.
I am just wondering at what point the company which use to have a good reputation stops giving a shit about it and turns the business to it's Revenue Protection Service.
And do they really expect me to be glued to the computer with the phone in my hand on Saturday night, or my reservation will be cancelled 24 hours after it was made, my dinner will be ruined, and my wife's weekend will be spent looking for another ticket through another travel site?
On the brighter side—at least they let us know that the reservation was cancelled. I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't.
I hate gnomes.

P.S. On Monday, two days after they cancelled this reservation, they charge my credit card for it. I had to call them and yell at them, and I also called my credit card and disputed the charge just in case. Somehow the words that come to mind when I see the gnome are not of a civilized nature.

Popular posts from this blog

{position:fixed} in iOS 6

I stumbled upon this oddity when upgrading to iOS 6 while working on a mobile advertising project, and it took me a better part of the day to figure out what is going on: all of a sudden an element {position:fixed} stopped working in a correct manner (which is staying put, while the page is scrolling), and started "sticking" to the scrolling page, moving out of the viewport, and then just "jumping" back to the correct location after the scrolling was finished.If you scroll this page , you will see it—hint: that's the one labeled "broken"—assuming that you have a correct device/browser combination. Mine was iPhone4 and iOS 6.0 (6.0.1-6.1.3 behaves just the same). On the original page, where I first encountered the problem, all of my elements were created dynamically using JavaScript, but at the end of the day (literally) it become clear, that the glitch is in the iOS 6 CSS implementation.Here is what happens: if you have an element {position:fixed} whic

iLife Revisited

After several months of DV abstinence, partly caused by an unprecedented attack of GarageBand eiphoria , partly - absence of footage of any value, due to rather eventless existance, I finally decided to return to the most time consuming of all of my activities, and make a movie again. Following is a short summary of the experience. I promise to keep this rant as technically oriented, as I can, in hope, that it might be of some benefit to fellow users. During nearly half of the year, which passed since my last cinematographic endevour, there were a couple of QuickTime updates, iPhoto update, and several system and security updates. Current set-up: System: Mac OS X (10.3.6) iMovie 4.0.1 iDVD 4.0.1 QuickTime 6.2 (Pro) iMac G4 800MHz 1GB RAM Good things first: audio and video ARE in synk throughout the whole 1 hour and 39 minutes of the show. I would be thrilled, if it didn't happen before, but the good thing is that it's still there. This is about it. 1. iMovie is as sl

Who is running MacAddict forums?

I normally hate to complain, but, being a happy subscriber to the magazine for some time now, feel like I do need to express a concern about my recent experience with MacAddict forums section of the web site. Due to some server misbehavior, I had to re-register, my old profile disappeared, while I was updating it. My new profile was assign a label "n00b" (None Of Our Business, if I am not mistaken. This is some way to welcome a new member to the MacAddict community). It could've been cute, but it isn't. And I don't think, it was intended to be: from the post of "Scott": "...using tables for layout...is for lame-ass n00bs..." I have read several more posts in the "Web Design and Development" forum, which, for some reason, was for a couple of days named "George" (the name is back to normal now; but here is how forum moderator "Gipetto" reacted when he was asked about this oddity: "...poop, it blew me away tha