Friday, June 04, 2010

TravelLink

I am so much fed up with travel agencies!
I think it's great that they offer better prices and wide range of alternative routes for your trip, but things are getting ugly when you have to fight for your rights.

I bought an Athens-Chania return ticket through TravelLink.
The for some reason, I didn't want to use my Athens-Chania part, but only the Chania-Athens.

Naturally, my first thought was to call TravelLink and ask them to cancel my Athens-Chania part and give me my refund. To my surprise, they said they will have to charge me 40€ for that!! Which basically means that to change a trip:
[Athens-Chania, Chania-Athens]
to
[Chania-Athens]
would cost me extra, and it would cost me about the half of price of the initial ticket!!

So, I called Aegean airlines and asked them what their policy was. They very kindly and carefully explained that it's possible to do what I want, and the travel agency should GIVE ME BACK about 30€..

Now that I had the knowledge, I called TravelLink to explain them what I was told from Aegean airlines. However, somehow, TravelLink persuaded me that they were right and that Aegean was fooling me...

So, back to Aegean's customer service again and asking for some more explanation. Of course, they insisted that I should get money back and that their system allows this change to be done. The only problem was that they couldn't do it because the ticket was issued by a travel agency and the travel agency had my money.

Knowing now that I was right, I sent an email to TravelLink explaining them how the situation is and asking them to call Aegean to solve the issue.

The reply I got from TravelLink was something like "OK, OK, we will NOT charge you 40€ that we said, but we will do it for free. However, NO money back". Of course I couldn't live with that, so I called them and insisted on getting for my full refund. They again refused to give me my money back, until eventually they admitted it!
TRAVELLINK COULD CANCEL MY TICKET, GET THE MONEY BACK FROM AEGEAN, BUT KEEP THEM AS FEE!!!
Then, why the fuck would you charge me in the first scenario??
Bas#$%rds...