18 Jul 2006 (updated 18 Jul 2006 at 16:05 UTC)
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This week's prize for the absolute worst customer service by a non-telco has to go to Travelocity/Lastminute.com.
Last week, I realised that I was going to have to take a detour on my trip home from the Kernel Summit and OLS, and I booked some extra airline tickets with travelocity.co.uk. They were to be picked up from YOW airport on Sunday. Nice and simple, you'd think.
Yesterday, I received a phone call from a gentleman by the name of Bablani Ritesh, from Travelocity. He claimed that it was not possible for my tickets to be made available at the airport as planned, and he had no option but to cancel the booking and refund my payment. I objected strongly to this, and suggested that FedEx would manage the task of delivering tickets to my hotel, but he refused to do this, claiming that the tickets had 'cash value' and could not be sent by courier.
I asked him to send me email to confirm this, and set about looking for alternative flights.
Not realising at this point that travelocity and lastminute.com are in fact the same company now, I went to lastminute.com and booked the same set of flights. Lastminute.com are entirely happy to send tickets by FedEx, although the field in the confirmation page which should have shown me the FedEx tracking number was concerningly blank. The FedEx form had refused to accept my telephone number for some reason, so if there was a problem, it wasn't clear they'd manage to contact me.
I then received the mail which I'd asked Mr. Ritesh to send, noticed that it was from a lastminute.com address, and remembered that the two companies had merged. I now feared for my new booking, since now I was relying on lastminute.com delivering my tickets by a method which they'd already insisted was absolutely impossible. I replied to Mr. Ritesh's email, explaining my concern, giving the new booking number, and asking what to expect -- asking if his earlier refusal to have my tickets delivered was merely because he was being unhelpful, or whether I should expect problems with my new booking too.
The email bounced -- he'd sent me email from an address which doesn't seem to accept mail! I forwarded the bounce to postmaster@lastminute.com asking for assistance, but nobody bothered to reply.
I then tried to use the enquiry form on their web site, but no answer seemed to be forthcoming to that either, so I telephoned instead. I spoke to a lady called Christine, who was unable to give me the FedEx tracking number immediately and reassure me that the tickets had actually been sent. She assured me that she would call me back within 5 minutes, though.
She failed to call me back, but eventually I did get a response to my enquiry through the web form. I do, thankfully, have a tracking number now and I can see that the tickets have reached the sorting facility in Ottawa already. I'm just waiting to see how they manage to screw it up now -- I half expect them to refuse to deliver to the hotel unless I'm there personally to receive the package; which will be hard to arrange since their form was too broken to accept a phone number starting '+44...'.
I have to say that they've really raised the bar for unhelpful and obstructive customer service. Refusing, point blank, to deliver tickets by either the pre-arranged method or by FedEx -- when that is part of the perfectly normal service that the company provides -- is quite impressive. Well done, Travelocity. When coupled with a total failure to communicate -- refusing to accept phone numbers, sending email from broken addresses, failing to return phone calls or email, you could almost be a telco.
Addendum:
Date/Time: Jul 18, 2006 10:57 AM
Activity: Delivery exception
Location: OTTAWA, ON
Details: Incorrect address