If It Says "Cheap" -- There's A Reason

Yesterday I was still kind of wonky about not having bought plane tickets to go to England this year; events conspired in 2006 to keep me so busy that I blonded the whole enterprise until the last couple of weeks of the year. So, last night, I requested and received from the spousal unit permission to make the purchase. ("What? You haven't bought them yet? Good God, woman," is what he actually said.) I'd got it narrowed down to two different (yet remarkably similar) routings and prices ... we chose one ... and off I went to make the purchase.

Mistake #1: Buying plane tickets from a website that doesn't have a customer service phone number ANYWHERE online.

Mistake #2: Buying plane tickets from a website that no one you know has ever used.

Mistake #3: Buying plane tickets from a website that doesn't advertise any sort of a customer satisfaction guarantee.

Next time I go to do this, I shall remember my dear darling friend Lori the Travel Goddess (she's at Boarding Pass Travel in Norman, OK - it's in the book - and the value of the service this woman hands out as a matter of course far exceeds the value of the $20 per ticket you pay for an actual human being to handle your world ... she knows all kinds of cool stuff, and I can't recommend anyone more highly) and ring her. I think it might have cost me another Franklin or so per ticket, but I'm going to have to spend that much on Rogaine and Pepcid (and possibly Prozac) after dealing with the people who are in (air quotes here) customer service at the travel website that I used to book this trip.

This is where I would normally wonder aloud what else could go wrong, but I think that might be too close to spitting in karma's face with this trip. In most other situations, I would use this space to go on a wild and raving rant about the devaluation of personal service in the modern world, but I'd really rather not re-live the whole thing. It was that awful. Instead, let me just say to the world at large that if a website promises Cheap Tickets (heck, if that's the name of the joint), there's a reason why they're so cheap ... and after seeing card charges totalling $500+ more than I thought I was going to pay, I have to think that their respect for consumers is cheap too.