I’ve been using Travelocity to book flights quite a bit lately because Travelocity bookings earn two extra points per dollar through the Chase Ultimate Rewards mall. So in addition to the two points per dollar I’d normally earn on travel purchases with my Sapphire Preferred card, I earn an additional two points per dollar by simply accessing Travelocity through Chase’s Ultimate Rewards portal. I’ve always considered this to be a fairly riskless proposition: since 2009, Travelocity and its competitors have offered the same fares as airlines offer for direct bookings (i.e., no booking fees are charged), and airlines honor elite status and award frequent flier miles for purchases made through online travel agencies (unlike hotels, which typically do not honor elite status or award loyalty points for stays reserved through online travel agencies).
So if I can purchase the same flight at the same price through Travelocity, and earn a higher kickback by doing so, why not? The answer, or at least one of the answers, as I recently discovered, is that if you book a flight through Travelocity and the fare on that flight is subsequently reduced, you are – for lack of a more technical term – screwed.
I recently booked two tickets on Hawaiian Airlines for my upcoming honeymoon through Travelocity. Each ticket, at the time, cost $1,040, and was subsequently offered – six days later – for $840. So I overpaid by a total of $400, which hurts.
This is not the first time that I have booked a nonrefundable fare that was subsequently reduced, but in each prior instance, I had booked the ticket directly through the airline and the airline offered me a credit for the difference between the fare that I booked and the lower fare that it subsequently offered. I did have to catch the reduction and request a voucher from the airline, but, upon request, I was issued a credit for the fare difference.
Update: Many airlines charge a change fee that may partially or entirely negate the amount of the refund; an airfare tracking tool, Yapta, synthesizes many airlines’ policies here. That said, airline representatives may be willing to waive these fees, as was apparently the case in my situation described below.
I figured that this was Hawaiian Airlines’ policy as well, so I placed a call to the airline to confirm my assumption, in case I needed to call the bluff of an unhelpful or uninformed Travelocity representative. The representative confirmed that Hawaiian Airlines’ policy is to would have issued a credit to me if I had booked the tickets directly through the airline.
Update: Although the representative explicitly stated that I would have received a $400 credit if I had booked through the airline, Hawaiiain Airline’s policy appears to call for a $100 change fee per ticket, thus reducing my credit to $200. I can only assume that the representative I spoke with was willing to waive the change fee, though she made no mention of a fee waiver.
With this information, I called Travelocity to request that they process the credit that I would have received if I had booked directly through the airline itself. This turned out to be a long and agonizing process, involving multiple overseas representatives and supervisors who were all ill-equipped to handle my inquiry. But in the interest of avoiding a long-winded rant about Travelocity’s atrocious customer service, I’ll spare you the details. Suffice to say that I got nowhere, and I was effectively penalized to the tune of $400 for booking through Travelocity.
But what really bothers me about the whole situation is that Travelocity misleadingly promotes itself as a means of preventing this precise type of misfortune through its “Travelocity Guarantee.” You’ve seen those commercials with the little gnome who presumably follows Travelocity customers on their travels and then interjects to their delight to enforce the “Travelocity Guarantee,” haven’t you?
What about that “Guarantee”? Shouldn’t it help me here? It certainly would seem applicable to my situation, given that very first purported benefit of the Guarantee that’s touted on Travelocity’s website (“The Price,” below) is precisely the situation that I found myself in:
“The Price” example is a dead ringer, right?
Wrong. Although I indeed found a “qualifying lower rate” after I made my booking (this much was conceded by the Travelocity representatives), I was told that I did not “complete the guarantee form in a timely manner.”
There’s the rub.
A “timely manner,” as defined by Travelocity, is “within 24 hours of your booking” even if the subsequent rate reduction took place more than 24 hours after your booking. So even though I called Travelocity within 15 minutes of “find[ing] a qualifying lower rate” and “complete[d] the guarantee form” immediately after the calls (as an admittedly pathetic form of protest), those actions were not “timely” in Travelocity-speak.
To me, this practice of promoting the “Travelocity Guarantee” as a supplemental benefit of booking with Travelocity, while failing to mention the crucial 24-hour limitation in any consumer-facing advertising – which effectively renders the “Guarantee” to be a burden as compared to the policy that would otherwise prevail if a consumer purchased airfare directly through an airline – seems patently misleading. It’s akin to a car dealership touting a supplemental warranty on all vehicles that it sells in its consumer-facing advertising, and then providing, in the terms and conditions of its sales contracts, that the supplemental warranty is only valid during the first week of ownership and that the 10-year warranty that would otherwise accompany the vehicle is void.
And to think that Travelocity brazenly markets this policy as “the Most Comprehensive Guarantee in the Industry”!
So I’ll consider this a lesson learned, and book my flights directly through the airlines from this point forward. Even for a points fanatic like myself, an extra two points per dollar isn’t worth forfeiting a credit in the event of a fare reduction.
Side note: Expedia appears to have a nearly identical policy to Travelocity, and Orbitz appears to have a slightly better “Price Assurance” policy: if a lower fare is booked through Orbitz for the exact same flight(s) that you previously purchased at a higher price, Orbitz will issue you “Orbucks” in the amount of the difference. This policy obviously requires a lot of prerequisites to be satisfied before a credit is issued, but at least a credit is possible in certain situations.