The Art of Customer Service Hypocrisy
The blame game between airlines and online travel agencies & how to fix this.
It’s well know that although airlines and third party companies are partners; their employees hate each other. When thing get sour, the airline would blame the book service and the booking service will blame the airlines. I had enough to complain about this, so I started thinking about how we can solve this!
At the crossroad of customer services & companies profits, most booking services will abandon you. They’ll never take a blame for a mistake and will try to upsell you when you’re in a state of frustration and abandonment. This is how I feel every time I miss my a flight because of a system error between airlines and third party services. Now, when terrible things happen to me, I get frustrated, challenge the system, try to figure out a way; but when the system is fuck up, this is where I turn my head to innovating. Let’s be honest, flying sucks! Not just because of how long the flight takes, but how inefficiently airlines operates. To put everything in perspective, I’m going to share a quick story.
On Nov 27, I booked a roundtrip ticket from Toronto to Phoenix via Expedia.ca (Yes the .ca matters because Expedia.com doesn’t have the itinerary from Expedia.ca who also doesn’t have the itinerary from Expedia ForTD). Expedia.ca sent me an email confirmation that they received my payment and that the ticketing is in progress:
I’m a developer and I solve problems for a living; so one things I like to do is break down problems into points to better understand the meaning. Let’s try to translate this message and understand what it actually says:
1. My ticket is not yet confirmed.
2. We are confirming it with the airline.
3. We will update your online itinerary within 24 hours.
I know what you might be thinking, and I agree “it’s a pretty clear message”, but you see, it always sounds straightforward, until you have to speak to Expedia about it...
Rightfully, based on this confirmation I assumed that my ticket was being processed and that in 24 hours it will be confirmed and I would have nothing to be worried about… Here what happened; On the 2 of December (the day of my trip), I went to the airport and on my way to the airport I tried to check-in; this is when I realized that I never received a confirmation email from Expedia. They never followed up with their statement 2 and 3… so I couldn’t check-in. When I spoke to the WestJet agent she said that I wasn’t in their system because Expedia never issued my itinerary. I was speechless; she asked me to call Expedia and mention that to them , but Expedia wouldn’t take the blame and instead blamed it on WestJet. This is what this article is about: the blame game between booking companies and airlines industries. Expedia ended up telling me that they weren’t responsible and that even thought I didn’t get the email confirmation this is not their fault, and WestJet told me that it wasn’t their fault either. Both companies told me that I would have to pay an extra fee to get on my next flight. I wasn’t going to be refunded by Expedia, but WestJet was offering me a cheaper alternative, so I paid a $75 fee to get on a next flight.
The base price for my trip was C$811.74 ( Flight + Car ). I missed my flight because of Expedia and they wouldn’t refund me and asked me to pay extra to cover their mistakes. This is unacceptable. They should have refunded me for my full flight and put me on another one.
If you’ve ever experienced this before, or felt betrayed and even abandoned by your booking service, please recommend this article because I’m about to share with you a solution on how we can improve the entire system.
Booking Escrow
An escrow is something that is kept in the custody of a third party. It’s like a safeguard, a neutral third party that hold anything of value, such as a payment until all transaction are successful completed. It’s an effective way to prevent fraud. When a booking services charge a customer account with the promise of providing a flight and doesn’t honor it ; it’s pretty much fraud. And many companies get away with this because most customers don’t have the resources to go against these big companies and sue them.
I feel that we need something like an escrow services between booking services and airlines that would always put the customer first. The customer shouldn’t have to be in the middle of a war of responsibility between an airline and a booking service. The escrow should be the party evaluating who should take the blame for it.
More Transparency & More Responsabilities
I’m not sure if this was intended or a UI/UX issue but Expedia is really bad at providing information relating to the context of the booking.
Airport check-in with X Operated by Y
From reading this I thought that my flight was operated by WestJet but apparently, according to Expedia and WestJet; my flight was operated by American Airlines and they were flying me through WestJet. This is either a wrong information or an unclear message, but between this email and the actual reality there’s definitely some discrepancy.
Responsibilities
We need a break down of responsibilities between each party, not a lawyer jargon but something clear for an average customers to understand.
I read the terms of services of Expedia and I found this buried in their terms of services:
Confirmation of a booking, which includes the essential elements such as the description of the Service(s) booked and the price, will be sent to the Customer by e-mail. If the Customer does not receive a confirmation e-mail within 24 hours of placing the booking, he / she should contact Customer Services at travel@support.expedia.co.uk.
Oh, did I mention it was Expedia.co.uk? This is North America, that doesn’t concern us. I read the terms of use of Expedia.ca and there were no mention of ‘calling’ if I don’t receive a confirmation; but their agents kept mentioning that it was my responsibility to call them to make sure that my flight was confirmed. Let’s be frank, most people could book their flight directly through an airlines but they use third party system instead because of some convenience. The part that most booking services miss, is that when we use their services it usually comes with a certain number of expectations. When we use a third party service to book a flight we count on that service to fulfill our booking, so it comes with no questions that this is their responsibilities to update us along the way on the status of that booking until it is fully booked. What’s the use of a booking service if they don’t fulfill their service?
It’s Your Story Too
On average, every day more than 8 million people fly. What happen to me an happen to any of you. When it will I want you to be prepared to handle the situation:
- If an airline tells you that they can’t find you in the system, figure out how to get a RECORD LOCATOR this is what the industry uses to find your itinerary.
- If the airline tell you that they don’t have your itinerary in their system but they can see your name; ask to speak to a supervisor. You should be able to still get in that flight (according to American Airlines & Expedia customer service). That didn’t work quite well for me, but that could for you.
- If an online travel agency doesn’t send you a confirmation within 24 hours, call them. Trying to avoid the blame game at all cost is the best way to prevent it.
- Airlines recommend that you book directly through them to avoid conflicts between the booking agency and them
Have a safe flight!
— This article was written during a lay over at Minneapolis — St. Paul International Airport on my way to Phoenix.
If you liked this article, recommend it: click the little heart button and make it turn green! Thank you for reading!
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Richardson Dackam is the founder and CEO of Reater, A freelance designer and full-stack developer who solve problems full-time, build startup part-time, love innovation & blog about it.
