Kayak.com to the rescue!

This is a little update in regards to my previous post about Cheaptickets.com

The airfare I found on Cheaptickets.com that turned out to be crap, I initially found on and was referred by Kayak.com. They have a little blurb on their website that says if you find a possible bait and switch situation, they'd like you to report it to them because they're working on making their site as accurate as possible and they can only be as accurate as the other sites they search. (For the unfamiliar, Kayak.com doesn't sell airfare, they just search most of the other travel sites at once then when you click on the fare you want it'll take you to the site that's selling it. They also have better search features than other travel sites). Pretty much you tell them and they get on the jerky sites' asses!

I clicked the button to report the problem to Kayak and then afterwards proceeded to contact Cheaptickets because I thought what they were doing was scummy and they should know it. I got a reply from Kayak today and it was actually from a real person who was genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of it. Her name was Karen. She also gave me the email address and phone number for Cheaptickets customer service in case I wanted to go that route. I replied that I had actually already contacted them and even sent all of my correspondence to her. I figured it couldn't hurt because in there they tell me they're looking into the issue, so that way when Kayak contacts them they can't act like it's news to them that there's been a problem. She said in her email to me that the Kayak engineers frequently get on the phone with airlines and travel sites to get to the bottom of these issues and that she'd pass the info I gave her on to them. She actually also asked a few more questions about the issue, and I could tell she had read my entire email by the things she was asking (wasn't fully expecting her to, I've gone back and forth with Cheaptickets more than a few times, which makes for a lot of reading).

It's refreshing to have human contact when dealing with a substantial company. I mean, they actually care. I've not recieved one scripted line or brush off from them, which is something else! I was really just informing them of something they had asked to be informed of and wasn't expecting to hear much more about it. I'm getting from Kayak what I was hoping to get from Cheaptickets.

Thank you, Karen from Kayak.com
(And, hello, BillO. I'm the nerdy girl from Massachusetts)

avoid Cheaptickets.com

Cheaptickets.com is exceptionally stupid. I thought I finally found a reasonable flight to Austria so I clicked on it with the intention of buying. Once I clicked a screen came up telling me it was "confirming my fare and flight details." When it was done the flight had magically jumped hundreds of dollars! That's just not okay. It came along with a message telling me:

We're sorry. Due to changes in airline availability, the fare for your selected trip is no longer available. We have adjusted the fares for all affected flights. The fare for your selected trip is now $ 877 total. See below. (Message 1048)

I checked in their FAQs and it says this:

During the time between your flight search and purchase, the airline may have changed the fare or the fare may have sold out. Airfares change throughout the day, based on demand for the flight and the airlines' right to modify them at any time.

CheapTickets monitors these changes closely and makes every effort to keep our fare displays as current as possible. Sometimes the fare difference is the result of a technical issue. In that case, clicking "Select" will display the most up-to-date fare.

That's nice. Just the fact that it's in the FAQs means it probably happens more than it should! I don't know, I just find this ridiculous. The first excuse is null and void because I searched for the airfare several times, so it wasn't like it sold out or changed in the time it took me to press the Buy button after searching. If it happens more than once, it's an issue. The second excuse is dumb, too, because if they were monitoring closely, their system probably should have picked up on the fact that the price for this flight had changed and it should have corrected the information. This same flight has been doing the same thing for days now! C'mon, you can't be making every effort to keep the fares as current as possible if something is happening for this long.

It seems odd to me that the only time they can show me the up-to-date fare is when I click on the button to buy the ticket. So if I want any accurate prices I'm expected to click on all the fares? What a waste of time. This just makes me think they're doing a bait and switch! Think about a person researching airfares who is checking out all the sites they can before settling on a fare. They'll undoubtedly find that Cheaptickets.com has the cheapest fare (because the fares they show don't even exist!) so they'll come back to that ticket in the end and just assume they waited too long and now the price went up, when in reality Cheaptickets never had the cheapest price! Chances are they'll buy it there anyways because it's probably the same as all the other prices and they're there and all set to buy anyways. So wrong.

I emailed them to tell them about their little problem and how I feel about it. It's actually turned out to be quite a correspondence I've got going with them. In their last reply they told me that I should call the hotline instead of emailing because of the "intricate nature" of my question. I don't know, I think it's a pretty simple question. Why aren't the prices on your site correct, and why have the same exact ones been wrong for several days now? That's fair, right? I'm assuming they want me to call the hotline so that I'm not wasting their time replying to their emails about the same topic over and over. I hate having my time wasted with the same problem over and over, too, Cheaptickets.com! If they only knew who they're dealing with. They basically just invited me to email them all day every day and waste their time in return for wasting mine. I haven't sunk that low, yet, though. It really isn't that big of a deal, but it just seems sleazy to me what they're doing and getting away with.

I'm also a bit more mad than I would have been because the very first reply to my issue gave the usual scripted apology, which I expected, but then they tried to SELL ME their services in the next breath. That's horrible customer serivce, that is. Why would I want to register for one of your crappy services if you can't get the very essence of an airline search right? The price, dumbass! The reply I got spent just as much time explaining this newfangled service as it did addressing my issue. Wow, what nerve.