Ridiculocity

Dealing with Travelocity over our canceled trip to Buffalo has been such a pain. It's taken three weeks to finally make headway, and in that time we've spoken to at least 10 different company representatives. Their customer service model leaves much to be desired when you have an actual problem that takes time to resolve. We wasted so much of our own time having to bring each new person (in a new country) up to speed on our issue and concerns before making progress. Plus, half of the people were incompetent, just parroting words back to me that they didn't really understand. This conclusion is based on the fact that when I called them out on using business lingo that I was not familiar with, they were unable to explain it to me in a different way that I would understand. They just repeated themselves as if I hadn't heard them. I really think that they need to assign a specific customer service rep to people with a serious issue/complaint. That would really streamline the process on all ends.

But the point is, the combination of a conference call between us, Travelocity, and AirTran and Jason handling the communications on our end (his "I mean business voice" seems to be more impressive than mine) has resulted in our finally receiving a refund (at least we will within the next 30 business days)! Yey!

We reached this conclusion on Thursday night and Travelocity sent us off with the promise of an email confirming resolution of the matter to arrive within 15 minutes. Well, by this afternoon I had still not received said email, so Jason called yet again. After being on the phone for an hour, the *new* person we talked to was able to see the refund approval code in our file, but told us that he couldn't send us confirmation. Then he said that we had to email him first before he could respond to us with the information we requested. After several rounds of "Are you kidding me?" on our part, he said that we would receive an email in 48 hours. At this point we were incredulous and called him out yet again... finally he put in a "special request" and we received a three sentence email in 1.5 hours!

It is absolutely ridiculous that sending an email to a customer should take so long. Today's shenanigans, combined with the following malarkey has made me feel like Travelocity was just being sketchy and dragging its feet in the hope that we would give up before they gave us the refund we deserve. Hence... ridiculocity.

Malarkey # 1
When you get on the line the rep asks for your phone # in case the call is dropped at some point and they need to call you back. At the end of one call where the Travelocity rep had me conference call with them and an AirTran rep, the Travelocity person hung up on me. I think she just ended the conference call incorrectly, but if this was the case I think she should have called me back, apologized, and inquired as to whether all of my questions had been answered. She didn't. Strike # 5.

Malarkey # 2
As I mentioned in my original post on this topic, Travelocity asked us to mail our paper tickets back to them in order to receive our refund. I did this, enclosing a long letter expounding on the details of our travel delays and cancellations, and listing several ways to contact me (mail, phone, email). After they received said letter, did they contact me via any of those methods? No! They call Jason's cell phone and leave a message. Jason's phone is neither the primary number on my Travelocity account, nor the number that we used on the five previous occasions we contacted Travelocity. I believe he called them once on the day we were originally supposed to travel. They seemed to have a sixth sense that he never checks his voice mail. This move just screams that they are going out of their way to avoid me.

I'm hoping that they have saved all their reading comprehension skills for the next letter I send. They'll need it to get through my long list of complaints and suggestions.