After spending ten hours at work on a Saturday, nothing could be more fun than spending another four hours trying to book travel reservations.
I am being sarcastic, of course.
Despite the strides made by companies like Orbitz and Expedia, making reservations still suck ass. I am attempting to book back to back to back trips for July, and nothing seems to be working out right. For example, I go to Orbitz and manage to get the flight I need at $470. Great. But when I go to actually book the f#@%ing ticket, Orbitz tells me that the fare I selected is no longer available, and it will now cost me $588. Thinking that I could do better by buying direct, I go to Northwest Airlines. But NWA tells me they don't have any flights serving my route, which is surprising considering that Orbitz was perfectly willing to sell me a fare on their airline. And it's no dice with Expedia, which comes up with some truly freaky routes that end up taking me TWO DAYS to get to the East coast!
Having no choice now, I eat the extra $118 and buy from Orbitz.
And then I try to rent a car. Orbitz finds me good rates with Alamo, but every time I click on one, it tells me the rate is unavailable and to try again (which I do... again and again and again...). Since Orbitz is hosed, I try to go direct with Alamo, but their web site is down. So then I go back to Expedia, only to find that something is messed up on their site as well (clicking a rate calls a Javascript that doesn't do anything). I tried Hertz and Dollar, but they don't have a rental counter at the airport I am flying to. Thinking it's a problem with my browser, I try again with FireFox, only to find things still don't work. Attempts at Travelocity and other sites return only ridiculously expensive fares.
So now I'm giving up and going to bed.
(and dreaming of bitch-slapping the people responsible for making simple online booking so freakin' difficult)
I love comments! However, all comments are moderated, and won't appear until approved. Are you an abusive troll with nothing to contribute? Don't bother. Selling something? Don't bother. Spam linking? Don't bother.
PLEASE NOTE: My comment-spam protection requires JavaScript... if you have it turned off or are using a mobile device without JavaScript, commenting won't work. Sorry.
Atom Entries Feed Comments Feed
LOL, tell me about it! It took me 2 hrs. last year to book online, I was yealing at the computer and my son looked at me like I was crazy. To top it off I had to delay the trip for a week and that took another hr. It’s a question of saving money but time is also money, running into dead ends like that can take alot out of your busy day and is it worth it when you’re maybe only saving like $20 by booking online?
AAARRRGH most Airlines suck!
That quote was spoken by Jesse (Aston Kutcher) in “Dude, Where’s My Car?” It’s an excellent general-purpose insult, and is especially handy to toss out when you’re losing an argument.
Bret: Yes, it is your turn! I clean the catbox at night, you do it in the morning. That was the agreement.
SJ: I refuse to play your Chinese food mind games!
I thought it was just me.
Orbitz has done that to me more than once – to the point that I won’t even consider using the site anymore, and Priceline booked me tickets that they didn’t bother to tell me were standby – thus stranding me in Dallas/FW for 8 hours.
I’ve gotten better deals on the airlines individual websites (or scarily enough, through aol’s travel page) than I have on Orbitz et. al.
I refuse to talk about how I’ve fared (no pun intended) with Orbitz for fear of jinxing myself. But I will say that, much to my surprise, United Airlines was more than willing to help me in any way possible when I called them up direct and asked them to honor a rate I found on Orbitz one time. The reason I called them up directly was because I had two vouchers that had expired two years previously (I didn’t know they expired as no one at UA stamped them). But the CSR I spoke with pushed them through the system and, combined with the Orbitz rate, my wife and I flew round trip from Chicago O’Hare to LAX for $125 each. I liked it. A lot.