Orbitz

Orbitz has been one of the most frustrating customer service experiences over the past year. The lengthy letter below describes the situation. In brief, Jocelyn bought tickets to travel to a wedding and when she went to check in the night beforehand, she found out that one her flights had been rescheduled making it not impossible to make it to the wedding. After several hours on the phone, they could not help us get to the wedding.

After I wrote this letter, I heard back from Orbitz offering us a voucher for $100. It was appreciated, but it was too little and too late.

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Orbitz
500 West Madison Street, Suite 1000
Chicago, IL 60661
(fax) 312.894.5001

Dear Orbitz,

We are writing to inform you of our most recent Orbitz service experience. Last night Orbitz let us down and left us very disappointed with your service. We hope that you will understand our frustration as I explain below. We look forward to hearing from you within the coming week.

This past January, my wife (Jocelyn) purchased round trip tickets on Delta from San Francisco (SFO) to Boston (BOS) through Orbitz leaving on June 1st and returning on June 3rd (record locator above). Since we fly around approximately a dozen times each year and have always been notified of any flight changes, we did not check our flights until Thursday May 31st. Coincidentally, on May 31st we were also alerted over email of the upcoming flight. However, we were quite surprised with what we discovered.

The email stated that Jocelyn was on a new flight (new flight number) leaving SFO at 9:30pm and arriving in LAX at 11:04pm. It then stated that the red-eye flight (also a new flight) was leaving LAX at 9:55pm and arriving in BOS the next morning. We were shocked to see that there was now a 1.25hr mis-connect. It was physically impossible for her to make her connection - yet the Orbitz computer seemed to see no problem in this itinerary. Additionally, we had never been notified by Orbitz of these flight changes. Therefore, late on Thursday night, less than 24hrs before the flights, we were forced to spend 3 hours booking a new one-way flight on United down to LAX in order for Jocelyn to make her Delta red-eye flight. We paid $134 additional dollars that we should not have had to pay.

We are extremely disappointed with this Orbitz service. I spoke with an Orbitz representative on Friday and was told that Delta notified Orbitz of the flight changes on February 17th. The representative also informed us that we were sent an email notifying us of these changes. However, we did not receive this email. To be sure, we searched our Gmail messages archive (which includes every message ever sent or received) and our spam filter. There is no history of an email and it was not caught by our spam filter. We do not believe that Orbitz alerted us of the Delta flight changes. Therefore, we are asking Orbitz to provide us with evidence that an email was sent notifying us of the flight change. If Orbitz cannot provide us with this evidence, we are asking that they reimburse us with a $134 Orbitz voucher to cover our last minute personal expense.

Orbitz has provided us with positive experiences in the past. However, we are currently frustrated and disappointed with Orbitz. In our mind (as well as others we have spoken to), Orbitz failed to look after the interest of its customers. Since Orbitz knew that there was a blatant mis-connect, they should have made an effort to alert us repeatedly of these drastic flight cancellations and changes. However, Orbitz failed to show any effort to notify us - either through email or phone. Other carriers and travel services handle this sort of matter quite differently and very carefully.

At this point, we are not likely to use Orbitz for future travel arrangements as we do not have confidence in your notification procedures. We hope that our trust can be reestablished in Orbitz by responding to this letter promptly. We look forward to hearing from you. Please direct your response to our email or home address listed above.

Sincerely,

Brian & Jocelyn Mason