Trip.it for Air Travel

Do NOT book airline tickets with third-party sites. Always book directly with the airlines. Your earlier experience is typical with a third-party vendor. You have already stated that there's poor customer service. What do you think would happen when a flight is canceled? Answer- the same no response.
You get what you pay for. Good luck!

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Being elderly has nothing to do with it. Learn from your previous mistake, and don't make the same one now. People pursue those super low prices for 2 reasons: ignorance of the consequences, or greed. Go to Google Flights to see what airline options you have and what prices are . Book directly with the airline.

I don't want to pile on, but you answered your own question when you wrote "I’m elderly & not fully trusting these travel agency websites" (elderly is irrelevant here). Why would you ever buy from a third party? If the seat costs "x", that re-seller can't be making money charging you less than "x", as he had to have bought it. And if through some quirk of economics he did get these for less than "x", there is no way the airline will ever give you any service if there is a problem. If you are concerned about trying to save a few dollars, then this is an incredibly poor gamble versus the loss if something has gone wrong, as happened to you. Think of the few bucks extra (if it really is extra) as insurance. one that this holds also for the train ticket-selllers , the tour re-sellers, and many hotel booking services.

Reserve directly with the airline.

Your experience with the 3rd party vendor is typical. If there is an issue, it’s the vendor you need to go through to resolve it, not the airline. It happened to me a number of years ago. When the airline overbooked, it was the 3rd party reservations (mine) that got cancelled. Fortunately it only cost an extra $50, but going through an airport I wanted to avoid. Lesson learned.

I suspect the reason you're seeing such a discrepancy in airfares is that you're buying one-way tickets. If you tell us where you're flying to and where you expect to fly home from, we may be able to suggest ways to mitigate the extra cost of one-way tickets.

But definitely buy from the airline you're flying (or a member of the same airline alliance).

I like to cruise to Europe every year & fly home ow.

I have found that one way tickets between US and Europe usually cost almost the same as a round trip.

If memory serves, I think on one occasion the one way was more than the round trip fare.

If some entity is selling a ticket at one third the cost that the airline is charging, RUN, don't walk away.

Milton Friedman was correct when he said "There's no such thing as a free lunch"

Famously abbreviated in my economics classes as TANSTAAFL, the verb being "ain't."

Trip.it. Is an Italian multi media outlet. You can’t find a number because they really aren’t serving the US market in any manner.

TripIt.com is a useful app for tracking reservations, not making them.

You may want to check Icelandair. They are a good option for one-way transatlantic flights. Their one way flights are roughly half the price of a round-trip.

I use the Tripit app to keep all of our reservations organized, but as stated above, that's not the same thing. Btw, the Tripit app is great and also notifies me of price drops on Southwest, which I fly often.

My sister was supposed to go to Italy for a wedding but had to cancel because of Covid. She wasn't able to get a refund because she booked third party. We booked directly with the airline and had no problem getting our money back.

Millions of travelers purchase ow tickets through a travel agent (3rd party agency) after a cruise to Europe, Many go through Booking, Kayak, Expedia and others. Surely what happened to me doesn’t happen often, does it? After finally arriving home & talking to Expedia, who called British Air for a 3 way call. The British Air Agent said there had been a “glitch” in the system on 24 May 2023, the day I was to fly home. This glitch he said, affected hundreds of passengers on their flights. I’m probably the only one who was having a mental but very controlled melt down, in order not to be hauled off to jail for making a spectacle, but as a retired UA airline employee, I had gone into shock. Traveling back home alone & receiving that horrible news, required me to hold it together & pray I could get another BA flight…but they never offered me anything since I had booked through a travel agency (Expedia). It wasn’t Expedia’s fault…it was a BA glitch & after flying them many years, I won’t fly with them again.