Monday, May 21, 2007

The Airline War

Ron's great niece and 5 of her friends are descending on us in July. They have changed their plans 46 times in the past month and are driving their travel agent to drink. The latest from the agent this morning is that they want to arrive on July 15th and four of them leave on July 19th. I told Ron to tell her we needed confirmed dates so we could book other guests.
We finally bought our tickets to Scotland and really screwed ourselves royally. We would up paying $825 for both of us, when they were $670. last month. Yesterday, I spent 3 hours trying to book the tickets. After using all of the sites to check multiple sites, I went to KLM and Lufthansa's sites directly and found yet better deals. However, when I went to book Lufthansa's flights, I kept getting a blank page and it would not reload. I did this on three computers and the same thing happened. I tried Firefox and IE to no avail. I went to KLM and found flights for $10.00 more and booked them. However, after finding the flights we wanted, I would get a error message saying we were not on a secured web page. I tried this 5 times and Ron called KLM. If we booked over the phone, there was an additional fee, regardless of whether or not we could get their site to work. The woman said she logged on and it was fine, though we could not. After my 6th attempt, it worked and I filled out the forms and was cooking. Then I got an error message that I did not include salutations, which are required. Who give's a rat's as* is they call me Mr. Or MS? Fixed that and then there was some other error, and on and on. Finally, I got to the payment part and I put in my VISA card number. Well they have this new authorization for Visa, which I had enrolled in, but forgot my log in ID and password. It has been over a year since I used it. I hunted that down, put it in and then received an error page stating the site was down for system problems. By this point, I was a maniac and told Ron we should just screw the tickets we have for the Military Tattoo, lose the $100. and skip the trip. His long face made me try ONE MORE TIME. When I tried for the last time, our discounted fare ($825 some discount) was no longer available, so I went for the next one, yet another $100 more. I went through all of the forms, page after page, after page and then at the end, I received a message. "You have already booked a flight for these days and times. Are you sure you would like to book yet another flight?" After I had Primal Scream therapy, I called KLM. They confirmed that the first tickets did go through and they resent me the e-mails with the e-ticket numbers. It is no wonder airlines are in financial trouble.

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