MercedesVillaman

I agree! ASAP TICKETS ARE A WASTE OF TIME. and they don't give you a better price. The process is loooong and unproductive. FIRST you put in your flight search. SECOND, they give you a NICE quote AND a discount code. FOUR, they tell you TO CALL AN AGENT. FIVE, you repeat your search and give your discount code to agent. BUT WAIT, THERE IS MORE! THE AGENT TELLS YOU TO WAIT HALF AN HOUR FOR HIS EMAIL WITH ANOTHER QUOTE. SURPRISE! THE QUOTE HE SENDS YOU IS MORE EXPENSIVE THAN THE PREVIOUS ONE AND THAN THE REGULAR OFFERS ON THE NET. Then the agent calls you to book your flight.

AlohaJoe23

Sorry I don't spend time posting on threads. Don't take the time to do such things.

I do spend hours and hours trying to save money on travel. Living out here in Hawaii is great but I am not like most that live here and only travel to Vegas. Being a family of four to go to Europe or Africa takes some careful planning and much attention to the cost.

I recently had the responsibility of planning a trip for 12 to Africa for July and August of this year. Not a cheap time to fly from Hawaii. Not a route served by many consolidators.

I am an avid user of Kayak and TripAdvisor travel sites for researching flights and to get pricing ideas. I have probably checked every other site that advertises on those sites. I am sure I spent well over a 100 hours over 3 months looking for the best deal.

When I finally decided on the best flight options at the lowest price I asked for ASAP's price on that specific flight. They were able to provide the best price for that option.

TripAdvisor usually gave the lowest price of all the major travel sites during the research process. Though as many of you know going to the carrier's website will get you an even better price.

This is for a flight on Delta and KLM. Delta's website was always lower than any place else but would vary throughout the day and would vary $12 if quoting the maximum 9 tickets vs a single ticket.

This was for a church mission trip and the usual travel specialist quoted a much higher price than what I knew I could find from Delta.

I had specific dates to travel and gave ASAP the task of getting 12 tickets at a cheaper price than the Delta website. Which as you bargain hunters know claims to have the lowest price.

The day we were ready to buy the tickets our International travel agent specialist for the church quoted $2,685 as the best price. Delta's website quoted $2,409. We are in the process of buying through ASAP for $2,375 for adults and $1,980 for the 2 kids under 12. Total savings over what I could do spending lots of time was about $1150 less than Delta's price of $28,908.

They saved us 4%. Or one all day car wash for the kids raising money.

Is it a simple process no. And if I was buying a single international ticket I probably wouldn't bother. The process is slow and even though we agreed to the price on Friday and paid via a preauthorised credit card they require a 3 way conference call between the credit card holder and the bank and their payment department. There payment department closes at 4 pm PST. So it didn't happen Friday. The card holder was unavailable on Saturday. The payment department is closed on Sunday. So we hope to complete that part of the process on Monday.

Meanwhile we have 12 tickets on Delta ticket class U eastbound and L westbound. These are on the Delta site and we have been adding seat assignments and meal requests.

We had preapproved the transaction on our end with Visa and we can see the pending charge but it still has not processed. Can something still go wrong sure. I will try to post again this week to confirm it is still on the Delta website.

I have 4 more tickets to buy from Seattle to Africa. The price quote from ASAP is only $14 less per ticket than the Delta.com site. But to a family of 4 $56 is better than nothing.

These tickets do allow accrual of miles on Delta or Hawaiian in our case. The group is thrilled because they saved $4400 over what an experienced travel professional offered them.

So if you expect savings of 30% from ASAP you are not being realistic. If you want to save over even the lowest posted rate from a mainline carrier's website for a specific flight ASAP might work for you.

Yes the advertising is shady but anyone who has bought a few tickets online should know there is almost always a few surprises along the way. As people have said learn to ask the right questions. And if you don't know the right questions stick to Kayak, Tripadvisor, Bing, Vayama, Priceline, Expedia, Travelocity or whichever site you find the best to work with.

AlohaJoe

EmailKid

Considering you don't take time, looks like you spent considerable time composing this post

That is a LOT of people relying on a company with a rather lousy reputation. Hope all goes well for you, because I for one would be very nervous if something went wrong, especially in Africa

EmailKid

tom911

Will you be able to find the time to come back here, after your trip is completed, and update us on how it went, and what, if any, surprises you had along the way?

AlohaJoe23

I will do my best to update. I have posted a few times on the Cruise Critic board.

I don't think I would blindly use any travel agent to just buy plane tickets. There is always a cheaper way of getting from point A to point B. I went with this one to make it easy on the travelers. Stop in Seattle, stop in AMS and landing in Nairobi. I could have save another $5,000 by sending them to Manila on one ticket and then another ticket on Gulf Air to Nairobi. Just didn't want them stranded in some middle eastern country I know nothing about.

The company so far is very responsive to emails back and forth which is how I prefer to do business. My rep usually works from about 2:00 AM to 11:00 AM my time and if I email during those hours I get a response within several hours.

I first contacted ASAP (ITN) on March 13 and I have had 9 e-mails to him about this deal going over possible deals. He was always prompt but never high pressure to make a deal.

Bottom line is they are wholesalers. Expect price not researching options for you.

AlohaJoe

sammies

Just wondering something why especially in Africa?

InTokyo

Maybe you should go and test this for us.

smitopher

I was referred to asaptickets.com and tried looking up a biz class fare AUS/MNL. The fare search returned $1,211.48. Uhm... that sounds too good to be true. It directs me to call and I call. The call center agent was kind of hard to understand but she got my travel dates and said she would look it up and call me back. She called back and said that it would take awhile longer and not to wait, she would email me the exact details.

Next morning I have an email.

Fare quote is $3,138.80

While that is a good fare for a UA/ANA itinerary in biz class, it was pretty far off from $1,211.48

I would rather deal with someone who does not lo-ball like that.

raostad

Actually, they seem to change their phone number quite often. I printed a quote from them last night and when I checked the website today the phone number at the top had changed from 800 731 2613 to 888 585 2727. Everything else was the same.

hobo

I have used asap tickets 3 times now for flights to Bangkok with a group of 6 friends. The first time I used them I was skeptical. The price was around $200 more than the quote online but still $100-200 cheaper than everywhere else. I just booked our third trip today and no different than the last two. Saving each one of us $150 means 3 days of our 8 day trips housing costs are covered. Don't try to change or cancel though, it will cost you a ton. We haven't tried but read the fine print. Flew on delta both trips and looks the same this time.

kenjh

We booked business class flights from Melbourne (Australia) to Rome for 2 adults (depart Dec 11, return Jan 12). We looked hard for good business class fares and no one could come close to what ASAP (ITN) tickets quoted. We ended up flying Thai via Bangkok and included a 4 day stopover in Bangkok on the way home. The price we paid for the 2 adult business class fares was $7k (USD). This was several thousand dollars cheaper than anyone else.

We were very sceptical when booking. Yes, the website does not include taxes etc when it quotes (or it didn't when we booked) and no, you cannot book via their website but we found the email communication with them fast and accurate. Because we are located in Australia and the flights were not touching USA mainland we were required to wire the $7k payment to ITN/ASAP. We were very nervous in doing this, but after much investigation decided to proceed. All went to plan, and the electronic tickets were issued. After we received notification that the tickets had been issued we contacted Thai airlines direct and confirmed the bookings had been made. All was confirmed.

We've now returned from our trip and can confirm there were no issues with the tickets sold by ASAP / ITN. We will always check what price they can do for international flights. If you're prepared to put in some time then you could save yourself a significant amount of money.

aktchi

Great. Any valid reason they wouldn't work with your credit cards and insisted on you wiring the money? Most of us manage to find good deals without such unsafe practices.

BTW, welcome to FT! (However, I'd also draw your and everyone else's attention emailkid's post #21.)

Thanks for joining in order to inform us on this matter. I suppose you, like many other 1-2 post visitors, might not be participating here a whole lot after this? Of course, I hope I am wrong.

EmailKid

Ah yes, post #21, where I welcomed another one hit wonder, Robinson84, who never again posted in some four years or so

And wiring money In this day and age You've got to be kidding me. That is a red flag if I ever saw one.

EmailKid, repeating: Buyer Beware @:-)

kenjh

Yes, wiring the money was of great concern. We had lots of email contact with ASAP / ITN to sort out the flight details (all good contact I must add). Initially we were told that payment via a US credit card was possible. We could not pay with an Australian credit card due to issues with us being able to dispute the transaction. I've experienced this before with US based companies. We arranged for a friend in the US to put the charge on her US issued credit card but were then informed by ASAP/ITN that we could not do this as the flights were not to or from US soil. In the end we had to make a decision as to risk wiring the money or purchase the tickets elsewhere. We undertook further investigation of ITN (IATA membership etc) and decided to wire the money.

The upshot is that everything worked. Tickets were issued, we've taken the business class flights and had no issues.

Would we use ASAP / ITN again? Absolutely. The extra effort required to communicate via email (we're on the other side of the world) and wire funds etc is well and truly justified when you save several thousand on the ticket price.

I must add that the tickets we purchased (Thai business class - Mel - Rom return) were non refundable, no changes allowed at any price. This was clearly communicated to us up front and we understood and accepted the risk. We made sure that our connecting flights (we flew back to Rome from Tel Aviv) were well in advance.

tom911

That's one of the very reasons you want to pay with a credit card--the dispute resolution process when something does go wrong and you're not provided with the services/merchandise you pay for. I've had to utilize that in the past for charges I did not authorize. I can tell you in the U.S. we have federal legislation providing us with protection for credit card disputes. You can not be required to pay that portion of the bill while it is under dispute and being investigated if the product you paid for is not provided.

If this merchant went out of business before you flew, how would you get your money back? Did you research their financials? Are they publicly traded or privately owned? To me it's rather frightening that someone would wire a company money and give up the consumer protection rights you have when using a credit card.

And if everything did not work and you wanted to dispute the transaction, would you not be up the proverbial creek by paying in cash via wire?