I cancelled a room reservation due to a contractor I was doing consulting work for cancelled a meeting and was charged the price for one nights stay even though I canceled 24hr. prior to my check-in time.

I feel I should not have been charged for this cancellation as I notified the motel people and TRAVELOCITY 24hr. ahead and besides, I do not have control of the weather which caused the cancellation of work to be done.

I have cancelled rooms in the past when.

made directly with a motel do to weather or other problems beyond my control with out any charges and having given shorter notification. I will make reservations directly with motels in the future.

We booked our all-inclusive trip to Mexico through Travelocity. The first page of the confirmation states all inclusive room for 2 adults and 2 children. Wrong. In fine print at the very end of the confirmation it states the hotel "may" charge extra for children. When we got to our hotel in Mexico we could not check in until we paid extra for our children to stay with us. I found this to be very misleading. The hotel even said we were the 4th or 5th family that week to have similar problems with Travelocity. I would never recommend to use Travelocity.

I recently had reason to use Travelocity. It was a moment of weakness that was a powerful, if unfortunately expensive, lesson.

I am not a neophyte when it comes to online ordering and scheduling of travel arrangements. I am a great fan of the good airline sites like Southwest and Delta, sites that are easy to use, always up and running, and backed by well trained, friendly telephone service agents. All elements that are sadly absent at Travelocity.

Recently, I had cause to fly to Spokane, WA, to visit an ailing family member. As far as the San Francisco Bay Area is concerned, you would think Spokane is the other end of the earth. Unfortunately, airlines that I use heavily either do not go there from here or go by such a circuitous route, I would have to plan extra days on th trip. So I wandered over to that well known brand name Travelocity, who proudly advertises “We look out for you all trip long and even before you go”. I think they actually left a couple of words out, they mean to say “We look out for your wallet and try to rip you off at every step of the way”.

Here is the process:

(1) I research packages. I find a 2 day, 1 night package deal for $505 dollars per person. Seems high. Same hotel, same airline, for some reason I click on an extra day: 3 days, 2 night package - $315 dollars per person. Now that is interesting!!!

(2) Purchase 3 day / 2 night package for two people: $630. So far so good.

The institutional care facility calls and indicates that the family member will be moving to another facility and that necessitates that we stay an extra day to assist. So back to Travelocity, feeling good knowing that they look out for us every step of the way. So:

(3) Return to the Travelocity web site, only to find that it is down. [Wednesday April 23, around 4 PM PDT]. Check periodically all the way ti midnight and it is DOWN. Nothing.

(4) Next morning, site is back up. But reading the instructions, you cannot change flights on the web site. You have to call a toll free number. This is not feeling quite so good.

(5) Call the 888 number, and of course get the automated attendant that puts me smoothly through a menu system that ends up with “please enter your 12 digit trip ID so we can pull up your records”, I enter the 12 digits, the auto attendant confirms the input and tells me “I have found your record, I will put you through to the next available agent”…. get to listen to more Travelocity propaganda.

(6) Agent Jason comes on the telephone, insists on repeating my first name over and over, mispronouncing it every time to make sure he really annoys me as much as humanly possible on the telephone. He is in Bangalore or some such place, pretending to be “on the west coast”. He asks me to give him my trip ID [see step 5] which he repeats back to me and then carefully, slowly reads out my entire itinerary to me, pausing at every line to ask me “is that correct Jack?” Finally he gets to the end [we are now about 10 minutes into the call and I have not even asked my question yet] and he says, what can I do for you? Ah, at last!!! I would like to extend the trip by one day, come back on the same flight the next day, stay one extra night at the same hotel. He dutifully repeats back to me almost verbatim what I have just said, adding “did I understand that correctly as what you want, JACK?”. I affirm, fighting an increasing desire to ask him to stop calling me JACK.

“Oh good. I will now place you on hold for a few minutes while I transfer you to the department that makes changes to reservations. “…. more Travelocity propaganda. F***!

(7) Several minutes later: new person gets on phone from “changes” department.

“I understand you want to make a change”

“Yes”

“Can I have your trip ID number?”

Repeat Step 6 in its entirety…. another 7-8 minutes having him repeat the existing itinerary with the exact same “Is that correct JACK?” every line. The only improvement with this second person is that his pronunciation of Spokane was vaguely recognizable as the city in Washington.

“So, what change would you like to make?”

“Add a day” …

“OK, I will put you on hold while I study the rates and see what we can do” [another 5 minutes of propaganda].

“OK, we can do that. The additional cost is $768.

“You have got to be kidding” …. same airlines, same basic fares, 1 extra night at a hotel is $768????? The whole trip started at $630!!!

“What is the cancellation fee if I just start over?

“I will put you on hold while I bring up that information JACK”

[gone for a good 10 minutes this time]

“If you cancel your existing trip, you will get $96 back”.

So I am screwed.

But I am not going quietly, stay tuned. Travelocity is now one notch above Comcast as worst consumer company to deal with. I will make sure everyone I ever meet who plans to travel will be told to avoid this cesspool of a company.

BEWARE - No matter what the price - Travelocity will not refund your money. DO NOT USE THIS FOR BUSINESS.

I booked a ticket for a flight FLL to YYZ on March 10th. The email confirmation never came thru and everytime I called them they came up with lies. In the end after some 12-13 hrs. they told me that the booking did no happen but I can re-book without assurances that I would not be double charged, which I refused.

In the end my credit card was charged for $32.48 (???) but I never got a ticket.