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Terrible experience with Travel Cuts

Posted by (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) on

I don't generally write a lot of bad reviews or discourage people from using a particular service or business, but this one has my blood pressure up enough to do so.

I am going to Portugal with a language and culture program run by a major university. Since it is run by a university, the group flight was arranged through Travel Cuts, an agency meant for students. After looking around, I saw they had the best package for all six flights, so I booked the group flight on the way back but taking the option to come back a week later than the rest of the group so that I would have time to visit family in Europe after the program ends. First, the entered in my card expiration date incorrectly for about a week, and kept calling me because the bank had refused the charge. They fixed that and all was well. Now, two and a half weeks before the flight out, I recieved my itinerary. Three copies. And nothing else. No booking reference. Okay, I can call and get that so I can check in. Then I notice they dropped a hyphen from my name, so my ticket doesn't match my ID or the card they charged to pay for the tickets. Then I notice they have me flying back on the wrong date. At this point I'm near a fit. Today, having calmed down enough to be merely firm but polite instead of a raging lunatic, I called and left a message so they can call me back tomorrow and get this straightened out. THEN I notice that despite the program itinerary saying we must be at our first destination by 4:00 PM and leave for our next destination a week later in the morning so we can do a brief tour and eat before driving 150 km to our lodging, they have us arriving after 8:00 PM for the first destination and 6:00 PM for the second! So our itinerary is shot all to heck.

I have emailed the leader of the group telling her about these several mistakes. Hopefully the program will not use this agency again. I certainly can't recommend them unless they work some miracles in the next week.

Posted by
97 posts

The issue I'm having with my name is that the spacing seems to be done at random, with my given names sometimes being entered as one, sometimes as two name, and my last name the same. The agency and the airline have it entered differently! Hopefully since my name is only unusual because I'm Portuguese, the Portuguese security agents will sympathize!

As for the wrong dates, the agency seems to realize this was their mistake, but the agent I spoke with said he cannot change the flight dates until after I've left, and then they simply won't charge me the $150 they normally would for changed flight dates once abroad. I would really like to get that in writing, and I am going to call again before I leave to get an estimated date of the change to assure that it happens while there is still room on flights for those days and I have all of my booking information well ahead of time.

As for the wrong flight times, apparently the itinerary was switched to the earlier flight time because of an earlier mistake on the part of the agency, and this is a correction. So they can fix mistakes sometimes, which gives me hope that they won't do anything crazy with my later flight dates. I am getting a bit tired of people on phones acting like I must be young and have never flown because I'm asking questions, though. I'm actually quite an experienced flier, but since my family is in the industry, I don't usually have agencies doing things for me! My name has certainly never been spitted out so many varied ways before, even if they can't enter the hyphen.

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