Part 4 -- Portrail of a bad company: Orbitz

Orbitz is a Chicago-based "travel agency" and one of the biggies
(along with Expedia and Travelocity) when it comes to online travel
bookings. The company was formed by a consortium of US airlines, but
is now part of Cendant.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/101/101230.html

Because of its early practice of undercutting competitors, it is
widely blamed for starting the price cutting war that has left half of
the US airline industry bankrupt. And while consumers liked that
policy, they hated the predatory and sleazy business practices that
Orbitz engaged in dealing with their customers.

http://www.elliott.org/vault/oped/2002/orbitz.htm
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/travel/orbitz.html
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/travel/orbitz_mwi.html
http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/.../16/02445/1132
http://service.www.my3cents.com/sear...riteria=Orbitz
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse....u=orbitz_blows

Although I have used Orbitz in the past for a couple of airline
reservations we generally use Expedia for most other bookings. But
for some reason only Orbitz offered the PHX-ATL-JNB-CPT connections on
South African Airlines that we wanted (only SAA has direct flights
from the US to South Africa). So we reluctantly dealt with Orbitz once
again. Big mistake. We should have booked directly with SAA.

Because of earlier cautions about using nicknames my profile on Orbitz
used only the abbreviation "C" and my last name, so that was the name
printed on the tickets that they sent. I had traveled before using
that initial, but either something has changed -- perhaps South Africa
is tough on initials and holds SAA responsible for insuring that the
name on the ticket matches the name on the passport. (And the
definition of "match" is vague at best.)

After getting the tickets, I noticed while looking around in the
Usenet airline group that people were being denied boarding by
airlines if their names on the ticket didn't match the passport name.
Here's a new one from just last December, for instance:

http://groups.google.ca/group/rec.tr...60b91b2f6636e2

So I called SAA directly and asked the question. They said that the
names did indeed have to match and that the travel agency would have
to reissue the ticket before it could be used.

So I called Orbitz, and was told that they would *not* reissue the
ticket in a different name (they ignored my pleas that this wasn't a
name *change* but rather a spelling out of the same name). After
several calls to higher levels of Orbitz management on the issue I got
the final answer: "Your ticket is unusable and non-refundable."

The final Orbitz manager I talked with was trying his best to be a
genuine prick. He taunted me, saying that even if I cancelled the
booking and paid again for the flight, the computer would cancel the
original reservation and find another different flight -- probably at
a later date and much higher cost. He said I would not be able to fly
with my wife unless I also cancelled both reservations and rebooked at
a later date. If he was correct, we were screwed and would suffer a
loss of many thousand dollars, lose our pre-paid hotel bookings, etc.

Happily, as it turned out, he was dead wrong. Only the airline can
decide if it will accept a ticket for travel. And thanks to a later
calls to South African Airlines ticketing supervisor the problem was
easily resolved and we successfully used the tickets we had. This SAA
supervisor simply changed the name on the *booking* even though the
name on the actual tickets was not changed. She also said SAA would
reissue the tickets if necessary when we arrived in Atlanta and went
to a certain office (they have no offices in Phoenix).

The problem then was if we could get to Atlanta on Delta Airlines
(then in bankruptcy, and faced with the threat of an impending pilots'
strike). I called the Delta customer service line and got to speak
with a droid in India who didn't understand my English and said we
didn't even show on the computer as having reservations on the PHX-ATL
flight. I then tried to telephone the Delta ticket counter here in
Phoenix, but was told that there is no direct outside line.

So I simply drove to the airport here, waited in a long queue, and
spoke with the counter agent. She queried the computer, found the
reservation, said there was no problem. With that assurance, we went
to the airport on our departure date (December 23) and only discovered
then exactly why there was no longer a problem:

Delta is a codeshare partner with South African Airways. The change in
the booking name that was made on the SAA reservation computer also
changed the Delta reservation name. The *boarding pass* carried my
full first name. The actual paper ticket listing my first name as "C"
was placed inside the boarding pass envelope and no one ever looked at
it. As long as the boarding pass name matched the passport name, all
was well. We sailed through the TSA checks with no problem.

After arriving in Atlanta, we boarded the SAA flight (skipping the
ticket reissue matter) and flew on to South Africa. Thanks to that
wonderful SAA ticket supervisor all of our travel problems were
resolved with one computer entry. And it didn't cost anything extra.

We were learning to love the South African approach to rules: Do what
makes sense. American companies like Orbitz would do well to learn
from that example. But they won't, and I will never again do business
with those *******s. And I encourage others to follow that practice.