8/05: No refund? No excuse!

No refund? No excuse!

Hotwire and Priceline often give you the very lowest prices on airfare
tickets, hotel accommodations, rental cars, and tours. But you don't
know the identity of the supplier or your flight schedule until after
you've made an unconditional purchase (which is why the travel
industry calls them "opaque" sites). For the most part, travelers
understand and accept the tradeoff between uncertainty and low price,
but sometimes they get caught in a bind—buying tickets or services
they find they can neither use nor exchange. Here's a case in point.

The wrong date

A reader writes, "I wanted to surprise my wife and adult kids with
tickets to our nephew's wedding in Israel. I purchased four round-trip
tickets through Priceline. Although the Madrid connection made the
trip less convenient than a nonstop, the price was right. My family
surprise turned out to be a disaster, however, when I found out that I
had been given the wrong date for the wedding. Priceline refused to
allow a change even though the airline claimed that it could. I am now
in for $3,500 worth of tickets and we will be flying while the wedding
is taking place. Do you think that we could fly four passengers
'standby' simply by showing up at the airport a day or two earlier?"

Priceline's hard line

Priceline takes a very hard line about exchanges: Once you buy it, you
"own" it. The only cases I know where Priceline (or Hotwire) has
offered refunds are (1) when an airline cancelled a flight and could
not re-accommodate travelers on the same day, or (2) when a hurricane
or other disaster has totally prevented travel. Both sites make this
total nonrefundability pretty clear before you click the "buy" button.

Still, some travelers continue to believe that, in unusual
circumstances, Hotwire or Priceline would be "reasonable" about an
exchange. Sadly, they're not, and for a reason. Should an opaque site
start to allow cancellations and refunds, even for "good" reasons,
suppliers would quickly stop selling through those sites. Total
nonrefundability is essential to the opaque business model. I'm afraid
I have to agree with Priceline's decision in this case.

The airline option

Could our reader fly standby with wrong-day Priceline tickets? That's
really up to the airline. In theory, there's no reason it couldn't
agree to a date switch—if not at the same price, maybe by collecting
an additional payment. In any event, if our reader is to find any
relief, it would be from the airline, not Priceline—after all, once
the ticket is sold, Priceline is out of the loop. If I were in our
reader's shoes, however, I wouldn't schlep the whole family to the
airport, hoping for seats at an earlier date. Instead, I'd contact the
airline's sales office, in advance, and offer to negotiate a date
switch, with some extra bucks as a sweetener. I have no idea whether
that would work in this case, but it would be worth a try. Asking a
travel agent to negotiate the switch might be a good idea—with a
decent fee for the agent's assistance.

Nonrefundability: Total and sort of

Travelers have enough trouble with pricing quirks without having to
deal with "soft" definitions of "nonrefundable." While almost all
ultra-cheap airfare tickets are "nonrefundable," some are more
nonrefundable than others. With many, although you can't get your
money back should you cancel, you can retain the ticket's dollar value
and use it toward a future ticket. Most of the big lines charge a fee
of up to $100 for such an exchange, but JetBlue charges only $20 and
Southwest doesn't charge at all. In the industry, that sort of ticket
is called "reusable."

Continued...

http://www.smartertravel.com/advice/...4&u=SL4F6B4DC5


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"To buy an island is the same as courting a woman. You can never explain exactly why you love her. It's chemistry--something you cannot define--a feeling that you can stay forever."
-- Farhad Vladi, Islands (mag) Jul/Aug 2005