The Travelocity Flight Reservations System is Yet Another Online Scam
Written: Nov 14 '05
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I hesitate when I use the word scam for referring to any product or service that I use, but there are certain aspects of the Travelocity Flight Reservation System that have lead me to conclude it actually is a scam. My definition of that word, is when a service is offered at one price, and when you actually go through the process of making your purchase, you find out that it was just a way to draw you to the site. Travelocity has become quite popular, mainly because of its television spots, which in turn cause people to believe that it is a great place to go for all of their travel needs. Well in at least the aspect of Flight Reservations, I am here to tell you that there are much better options than Travelocity, and I am going to explain/show exactly what I haven't liked about the site.
The Travelocity Flight Reservations Main Site
Travelocity offers sales in airfares, hotels, vacations, car rentals, and cruises through their main site. What I am focusing on here though, are specifically their Flight Reservation pages. When you get to the main page, you are queried with several selections that you can choose from. Those include: Round-trip airfare, one-way, or multi-destination. No matter which format you choose, you are given a survey form that requests information about your trip. You are asked to give your starting point and destination, the dates that you are looking to travel (and times), how many people are in your party, and what types of fares you are looking for. When you are happy with your selections, you press enter, and the site takes a few moments to look up the possibilities of flights for your trip. The waiting can be a little annoying at times, but it will come back with results that pertain to your trip.
On the "results" page, you are given a list of all of the flights that fit into your plans of leaving on a specific day and returning on another specific day. If you have not clarified that you want a particular time, they will give you a ton of options that are available to you. The information given with each flight are the airline name, the departure time, the arrival time, the total travel time, and the cost of the ticket(s). This is all well and good, and the search engine works quite well, but the problems start about the time you decide that you like a particular departure time. The first trick about the site, is that they offer you times which aren't going to be offered at that same rate later on in your search. For instance if you have found a departure time of 6am, at a cost of $108 it does not mean you will be paying $108. The reason, is that you must then select from a new list of flights departing on the date you are flying home. This 2nd departure page is where you find the real costs, because they don't really link the two together in the first place.
If I have confused you, it is a common thing with the Travelocity site, because the price to get there always seems much better than the price to get back home. You can think of it as a mark-up to decide for yourself, or you can see it in terms of a "scam" as I have found myself doing. The site has more problems associated with that, but I will get to that in a moment. From an aesthetic stand-point, when the search engines are used, you can find just about anything you want, and you will even be able to view the seats that are available on a given flight. They give you everything from the type of plane you will be flying, to the duration of the flight calculated to precise minutes, to the flight numbers that you will be on. All the information you could possibly want is there, so if you don't care about price this could be a great site for you. But, because I do care a lot about the prices I am paying for airline tickets, Travelocity loses a lot of points there.
Doing Business with the Travelocity Flight Reservation System
I touched on the thing that I feel really causes Travelocity to be a scam in my book, and those are the promises of getting low fares by showing prices that seem almost too good to be true. Once you start making your transactions, you end up finding out that in fact, it really is too goof to be true. It is almost like a bait-and-switch where they lure you in with one price, but in the end you have to pay more for a flight they have enticed you with. They don't give you many ways out of it either, because you have to decide the first leg of your flight before they will even let you take a look at your return trip. This puts you down a path of planning out times, and when you find out that you will have to pay more to keep your original times, you end up a little less likely to cancel your reservations.
In my experience, it has always been a good idea to play around on the sites before actually committing to a given purchase, and I would advise anyone who wants to go with Travelocity to browse through it before you actually think you have a set time or price that you like. I think it is a terrible business practice to make your customers decide what departure flight they want before they can look at the return flights. I think that the best online reservation systems are where you can put them side by side, and work with both your departure and arrival flights at the same time. This is a practice that the airlines do most of the time, and I can see that Travelocity wants to use it to their advantage by not providing that same tool. If you end up with a problem, it isn't easy to get a customer service representative on the phone, so make sure you are signing up for the exact flight or package that you intended to, or you could be in for some problems.
How I really feel about the Travelocity Flight Reservation Site
By this point, I am sure you know I am not going to recommend using the Travelocity site for anything regarding airline travel. I admit that they do have a nice looking search engine, and that when you use it, you can find a lot of "potential" flights, but when you get to the purchasing point, you will find that they really aren't all available to you. The site is very slow at times as well, and this can cause a little bit of stress when you are trying to book a flight quickly. If you don't care about how much money you spend, and you have the time to sit and fiddle with a web-site for a while, then I think that you could find Travelocity useful. If however, you are looking to get correct information from the start, cheap rates that aren't pulled back from you as you progress through your transaction, and you want the process to go quickly, then I would say to stay away from the Travelocity Flight Reservation Site.
Recommended:
No
What product did you purchase or try to purchase? Airline Tickets
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