SO as I understand it, no one at Expedia.com was able to facilitate a one-day extension on a ticket. The reason for said extension being that the reason for the flight, a mother being visited, had taken ill and was on her deathbed. Well, kudos to the insensitive, buck-passing microcephalics at Expedia! I am a receptionist in a Doctor's office, and deal with the public on a constant basis, and let me tell you, the patients and businesses that call here are often not pleasant in the slightest. Does it bother me that I become the target of nasty attitude and emotional venting? Hell, yes! However, the point is, THIS IS MY JOB. I am the interface between the patient/business/individual and the doctor, so it behooves me to expedite things like appointments, responses to qeustions, prescription changes, etc. And I do, I don't always like it, but that's how I earn my bread. If I am swamped and someone calls with an emergency, well, I have to buckle-down and help them out. Perhaps the employees of Expedia.com should receive not only some instruction on how to deal with the public in a decent, civilized, compassionate manner, but also some remedial English instruction because not only was some of the grammar and spelling of these people atrocious, but they perhaps need to be reminded that the name Expedia comes from the root word expedite (to accelerate the progress or process of).

Like I stated previously, not ALL Expedia agents are on the same level as some of those that have posted on this site.

In fact, many agents that will never post here spend hours attempting to reaccomodate passengers or find ways to help. I personally have spent hours with airlines, working out ways to get customers on flights.

The best tip I can give to disgruntled passengers is to ALWAYS read all rules and restrictions before you purchase. If you don't agree with these rules, you are under no obligation to use our site.

Like I have also stated previously, I am truly sorry for any problems that our customers have run across. However, I do not believe that Expedia is doing anything illegal. I will continue to work here because this is a good company and we do good business.

--start rant with crumbly facade of politeness---

I'd still like to see an Expedia-promoter talk about the problems I wrote about: The Expedia agents I spoke with would not, or could not, give a straight "No, *WE* cannot and will not change the ticket, *WE* cannot help you and your mom at all (except would you like to buy a $2000 1-way fare for her if she won't take her original return flight?)." They said-- they insisted-- that all restrictions were due to Air Canada.

While phoning them *I wasn't at my computer- I had to take the agents' statements at face value*. I could only take them at their word, not their web page. And their word, as I now view it, was "lie through our hollow teeth until the customer's cell phone battery runs out."

Yes, the ticket had significant restrictions. But my mom's simple 'go up for the weekend to Toronto to visit her mom' trip had become a 'stay at the hospital bed of her dying mom' trip. I could give the Expedia agent(s) the doctors' and hospital's names- they'd confirm the sudden switch of health state. Within a few days I could give absolute proof of her illness via the funeral home's name.

I wish Expedia had told the truth right away- I certainly had better things to do than be transfered from (evidently fake?) supervisor to supervisor to supervisor. (then calling AC, then calling Expedia again based on what AC had said...) For example, I could have been talking with an airtravel related company that allows its reps to show sympathy and flexibility. In all this, I was going through the fearful-sharp pain of upcoming grief(1) and being unable to fly up there myself. Air Canada, United, Southwest- each had reps going out of their way to help, even offering ways to get me up to Toronto myself (but I was taking care of a sick relative and couldn't leave). Their reps didn't mention how long we'd been on the phone. Their reps thought of possibilities and contingencies at a time I wasn't much able to think of them myself. Expedia? I can only imagine their hyaenaish laughs once they hung up their phones and went back to their kickkittens cubicle game.

My Grandmother would have had sharp words for me for not using a travel agent. She had started a travel agency in Ontario, it had grown to 10 offices before she retired. [and now how I wish I had a recording of an angry "Ekatharin..." from her. The voice memories are fading (CSLewis's snow on a statue analogy, but this is snow in an audio memory)]

-----end rant, start other----
(1) this my first experience of death of a person you didn't think would die. I'd assume most people feel this of siblings and parents, but not necessarily grandparents. Yes, she was 80 and in a nursing home, but wake me up midsleep and administer an effective lie-detector test I didn't believe she'd be gone now. She radiated a pure stubborn that seemed to preserve her in an slow fade that could've lasted decades. In retrospect we think she chose her death's day (a common action of many female relatives on that side. For now, I choose February 30 in some year after they've needed such for a while) waiting until all close relatives could make their last visits (I choose to have relatives visiting from Triangulum/M33).

She and her family escaped Russia on the last train before the Red army trains arrived. They rebuilt in Manchuria. She moved to Hong Kong, met and married an also stateless Russian and joined him in becoming British. He signed up with the HK Air Defense on Dec 6, 1941. HK fell on Christmas, that year. They both spent 4 years in POW camps, rebuilt their lives in HK, then moved to Canada. She remained an optimist.

If one is to believe that the self-proclaimed employees and ex-employees of Expedia in this forum, then it's safe to say that this is one company that truly _despises_ the customer, and is rotten from the very top to the very bottom.

It's also abundantly clear that these respondents have not the slightest clue as to the _actual_ issue here, which is public relations.

They may fail to realize that the people who began this discussion, and have posted horror stories regarding transactions through Expedia, have firmly established reputations, and are well known and respected both on and off the Internet.

This is the crux of this customer relations meltdown. Alleged employees of Expedia _continue_ to defensively obfuscate the real issue with repeated lambastings of their very customers! Anyone who's spent any time at all designing, developing, and maintaining customer relationship management systems understands all too well that it's the height of folly to place the onus of understanding ostensibly hidden details on the customer. This customer, after all, has chosen to conduct a transaction via the Internet precisely because of the ability to save time, and streamline the entire transaction.

Customers that don't understand, or take the time to familiarize themselves with the confusing and anti-customer minutae (in red, purported Expedia employees proudly point out, for the 10% of the population which is colorblind), are essentially shite outta luck. And what's more, screw 'em! they add with despicable disdain.

Expedia, if it truly is peopled by such foul and arrogantly spiteful miscreants as have spoken here, is in deep, deep trouble as a company.

I would expect that someone responsible, if there is any such soul at Expedia, would take the time to post here forthwith and head off any additional damage to its reputation, so unarguably damaged by those claiming employment there in response to trustworthy tales of customer disastisfaction.

No company has got the online travel biz right yet - especially in customer service. I also travel a lot. I've used all the sites - Expedia, The TRIP, Travelocity, Orbitz . . (I believe these four are different companies. I know Orbitz is owned by SABRE here in Dallas.) I have gotten some good deals with Expedia, but you really have to read the fine print. Travelocity is consistently the best - but they are still screw-ups.
I was "upgraded" to a "preferred" or "gold" membership or whatever Travelocity calls it - they sent a letter saying this was a free upgrade since I used them a lot. A few months later, they charged my credit card $20 for this "membership." This was not something I signed up for or asked for - apparently it was a "free trial" membership that they stuck you with unless you explicitly called and cancelled it. Despicable!
On a recent trip, I had to reschedule a flight. I called the "Preferred Customer" Gold number, or whatever - thinking, well, maybe I'll get a little more help than normal at least. Nope. They were stupid clueless robots. All they would do was quote me the damn rack rate for a ticket change. I didn't need a travel service for that, thank you, Expedia did the same. "That's all there is, that's all we can do..." I heard.
Well, I ended up just calling the airline direct. Explained my situation and got a new ticket from them for several hundred dollars less than these travel "service" companies were quoting. Anyone can log onto SABRE and look at the rack rate, people. Service means you would have called BA on behalf of your customer, talked to them about what they could do, called me back and booked me a new ticket.
I would say Expedia is the worst though. I've had countless hotel reservations that simply "didn't exist" when I tried to check into the hotel. Even upon presenting my confirmation number and a printout of my Expedia, I've been told that this is just an internal number for their system, and means nothing to the hotel. I've called Expedia on such occasions and I was given such oh-so-intelligent responses such as "they must not have received your reservation" or "it must not have been in their system." Then - they sometimes offer to find me another hotel room in the city. No thanks. I want the hotel room I booked, the one which your company confirmed for me. I don't need your service to "look around" - I can do that myself. The reason I pay you is convenience - to help remove some hassle. One rep told me I should have "called the hotel yourself to confirm." Hello? Isn't that the point of your sending me a confirmation number - isn't that your job?

Traveler: you'd better not involve yourself with anything involving statistics. Your premise that you can count 'satisfied customers' by the negative call rates is fundamentally flawed, I wouldn't be surprised if you were management at Expedia.

well id first like to say that i no longer work for expedia and i want to admit that i hated the job....infact i know that maybe 1 in 5 agents really like their job....during our breaks we used to share our "war stories" with other agents in the office....telling about how we talked a customer down or how we saved a customer some money....but all in all we mostly grumbled about those dumb passengers who call up and expect for us to be able to do everything under the sun for them...and then of course they complain once we tell them that that isn't possible...o well though...then u get those lovely customers who don't read the rules and then call up and when we advise them of the pens to cancel their res they get really offended that we would have the audacity to want to charge them money!!! LMAO...hmmm...we get quite alot of those calls and I'd just like to say to all of you dumb people out their that want to purchase ANYTHING online to read the full rules and restrictions....cuz beleive it or not!!! it costs the company money everytime someone tries to purchase anything online...link up fees to Credit Card verification sites...transmission fees...faxes...all sorts of fun stuff so you know every business has to stay in business...and im so sorry to the customer that calls up complaining about they booked the wrong dates or some crap like that!!! well too damn bad isnt it? what we only showed the dates in the purchase path like 3 times and u mean to tell me u didnt read them to make sure???!!! well damn....that was just about a 200 dollar mistake wasn't it? so all in all id like to say that Expedia is making bank from very dumb passengers and that id suggest to any and all customers....face it...in the travel world u r going to get screwed by anyone and everyone....so in picking your travel agency make sure that they give u the vaseline first....atleast that way it will be easier on you!!!

Clearly, there's a serious and unarguable customer relations problem with Expedia.

Those of us on the customer side of such transactions have no way to verify whether the accounts given by the employees of such a business are legitimate or not. Some self-proclaimed Expedia employees here have alleged that they're trained to utilize customer-unfriendly tactics, and shameful, if not specifically illegal practices.

Still other self-proclaimed Expedia employees have emerged to, get a load of this - BLAME THE CUSTOMERS.

This would be laughable were it not for the fact that nothing any employee at the lowly, non-policy-setting level of such an organization might say, one way or another, has any real impact on this very real situation. Employees, the good and the bad, merely carry out and embody the policies and philosophy of the company leaders. It is the leaders that set in place the rules, and establish the guidelines and values by which a company proceeds.

This nightmare of customer relations lies squarely at the feet of upper management, not the lackies who man the phones or their tin-star supervisors. There may well be heroic efforts on the part of some of them some of the time, but that has little bearing upon the overall company image to *US*, their customers or potential customers.

When someone reads the heartbreaking story of the person whose grandmother took ill and had to contend with a beastly go-around with Expedia and the airline, the taint will last a long time. Though, as stated above, the sentiments of among the workers are inconsequential, and even understandable, given their lack of altitude and perspective within the company, the fact of where the fault lies - Expedia or the Airlines - IS NOT THE POINT!

The point is, of course, that the public, in going through Expedia, sees them as their representative, their advocate, their agent in this transaction. If they'd wanted to deal with the airlines directly, they certainly could have done that. But they chose, perhaps unwisely in retrospect, to use the services of Expedia to arrange their travel plans.

It would be far, far more financially expedient, if you'll excuse my pun, for Expedia to just eat the cost of resolving one of these problems, and then trumpet their unflagging service, than to attempt to justify their shamefully niggardly actions through fine print, red or otherwise, that everyone agrees is almost never read by anybody.

Shame on Expedia. Shame on the people at the top of that organization that have created an atmosphere and attitude that allows their employees to blame their customers and feel completely justified about it.

Expedia is only hurting its own bottom line if it ignores the only voice that matters - the customers'.

Here's the original link: http://boingboing.net/2002_05_01_archive.html#85126946

just wanted to send ya a thumbs up phone guy; i try to go out of my way and do what i can to help those that are sent to my queue; i must say i have learned to greatly appreciate ppl that work in call centers since i started here and especially those agents that answer the questions i don't know the answers too or assist me to helping resolve an issue that best resolves the problems the customer may be having...so to all of those agent who assist us agent... i as an new csr would like to say thank you!!!

note to mark.... those odious fine print rules are not the ones that i am talking about actually. the rules that i am speaking about are the ones in RED writing that pp just tend to passover when clicking that button that clearly states "purchase this ______; i agree and accept the rules and restrictions"... i do understand about the fine print rules that most all businesses have which i admit i don't always read myself. "depending on what it is i may be agreeing to"

NOTE TO BOING BOING WEBMASTERS: If you are going to post a link to a quick topic discussion that was started long ago, maybe somehow you could have the discussion include a backpointer to what started the whole thing off.

> if people are just trying to get a good deal and fly thru > the rules without reading them, then i'm sorry it is your > tough luck.

You're right. But most people don't read the terms. They do business with Expedia expecting them to be a good company, not one that hides behind its truly odious fine print legal crap.

You're lucky nobody reads the terms. If potential customers read and understood Expedia's terms, Expedia would probably go out of business.

FOR ALL YOU POSERS OUT THERE, WHICH I AM ASHAMED TO CALL MY CO-WORKERS, PLEASE GROW UP THIS IS A BUSINESS AND I CANT BELIEVE WE ARE AIRING OUT OUR PERSONAL ISSUES WITH OUR OWN COMPANY ON HERE, AND TO BADMAN, PHONEGUY, AND GOOD AGENT *WINK* YEA I KNOW WHO SOME OF YOU ARE.... YOU ALL ROCK... AND WE KNOW WHICH OFFICE ROCK'S THE BEST DONT WE?
I DO KNOW THAT ALL THE EXPEDIA OFFICES ARE AWARE OF THIS WEBSITE....