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Airfare.com continued.

Posted by (United States) on

Dear Folks,
This is sort of an update of yesterday's thread. Again there appeared some super deals on hipmonkey.com for purchase on airfare.com. Again I purchased Virgin Atlantic tickets, with 'business class' on the screen all the way through. Again the 'check my trip' (sic) site said I had coach tickets (this time, not even the extra long coach).
I called airfare.com. They kept telling me that I had business class tickets. I asked how to select my seat. They said to call Virgin Atlantic in the morning, or at least 3 hours from the purchase time.
Airfare.com insisted I had business class tickets - until I had them go to the 'check my trip' place. At that point they agreed with me.
This second time I purchased at about 9:45 pm. Had I not been paranoid, I would have believed Airfare.com and waited until morning to get my seat, only to learn that I had coach.
Airfare.com lets one cancel until 11:30 pm the day of sale. I was almost stuck for tickets I couldn't use.

Two lessons here. One, Sarah, stop being greedy. Two, there is no such thing as too careful when using these sites.

Posted by
9363 posts

It's things like this that make me leery of using anything but the actual airlines' websites for booking. There is just too much that could go wrong, and then you don't know which layer of the transaction caused the problem, which can make it hard to fix.

Posted by
223 posts

I agree. (That's where the 'don't be greedy' comes in.) I think I've learned the lesson without being completely up the creek. I have a lot of trips left this year, so I was trying to save. Not worth the headache.

Posted by
2186 posts

Sarah,
Don't be so hard on yourself. More an more, as travelers, we need to check upside down and sideways. I ran into something along this line trying to book an award travel. The column read "business", but unless you clicked flight details you wouldn't know that the longest leg of the flight was actually coach. Fortunately, I caught it before I booked, but another poster on this website didn't and is now stuck with what is essentially a coach flight for premium miles. Good luck!
Patty

Posted by
223 posts

Patty,
Hey, thanks. On the bright side, there was no resistance from Airfare.com in canceling - once they picked up!
I haven't yet graduated to award miles use by myself.
The material and emotional support of this forum really is encouraging in every sense of the word - I have the courage to do more than I ever dreamed possible.

Posted by
1221 posts

Booking direct also makes the airline give you the full 24 hours to cancel if you're in the United States, and are at least 7 days from departure. Hurrah for Department of Transportation rules!

Flyertalk's Mileage Runs section is pretty good at compiling cheap fares that pop up. Unfortunately, you missed a short (maybe 36 hour) really good fare sale as reported there for select US-Europe routes in business class (often less than $2K per ticket) for peak summer travel by a couple days.

Posted by
223 posts

You are so right. At the time all this was going on, I couldn't remember if international flights were also protected (they are). Then I figured that with all of these thousands of dollars I was charging, I was still risking clogging up my pet credit card if something worthwhile became available.

I did not know about the other service. Thanks for that!

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