Expedia Accused of Voiding, Renaming Itinerary “F-U”
Jeff Edwards October 20, 2016
A customer claims that the travel site revoked her travel plans without warning after she complained about unexplained charges and hostile customer service.
The original issue that Cara Viramontes had with the travel booking site Expedia doesn’t seem like all that big of a deal. Viramontes said she simply questioned why a travel insurance fee was charged for her infant child, but she says what happened next defies reason.
The new mom told Los Angeles ABC affiliate KABC that when she called to get an explanation for the fee, the agent on the phone didn’t seem very eager to help. “He’s not charged a ticket so why do I have to pay travel insurance for him?” she recalled asking. Viramontes says not only did the customer service representative not have a satisfactory answer, the person on the phone refused to let her speak with a supervisor.
Viramontes says she took the unpleasant exchange into account when she received a customer satisfaction survey from the company a few days later. She freely admits her evaluation of the experience was not especially complimentary.
“Two days later, I get an email that my flight is canceled,” Viramontes told Eyewitness News 7. “I’m like, unbelievable. I wonder – if I wrote a review, two days later my flight’s canceled with an ‘F-U’ on the top of my itinerary. This sounds a little fishy.”
Viramontes says Expedia officials told her at first that she was the one who canceled the trip. “It was an absolute nightmare,” she said. In fact, according to Viamontes, it wasn’t until she posted her offensively altered itinerary on Facebook that Expedia officials started to take her claims seriously.
This story has a happy ending of sorts. Expedia executives have apologized, promised to rebook the trip at no charge and are said to be launching an internal investigation into the disturbing incident. Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi even reached out directly to Cara Viramontes’s complaint on Twitter.
Sometimes when you give individuals the power to do right by customers, they do wrong. We will make it right for Cara, @JJMothershed.
— dara khosrowshahi (@dkhos) October 18, 2016
[Photo: GeekWire]
Modern database security controls require transactional change control. If this has any validity, it'll show up in the reservation's change history. It's an easy audit log review that can be done by their DBA. If the story is true, it'll be very likely result in at least one termination.
I am not inclined to believe this story. With all these social media stories that are more recently served as near factual on FT, we only get one side of the account. The 'evidence' presented looks at the very best assembled. The outline of these stories always follows the same simple pattern: customer wants something from the travel contractor, wholesaler, airline etc that is not covered by the contract and is hence declined. The the customer who is always a victim or vulnerable of sorts (mother here), claims that the service agent said something outrageous, racist, sexist, threatening, or harassing and creates a social media fuss .... and the company then caves in partially. Just doesn't sound convincing in the least. I wished those cheap stories would stay in Facecrook where there belong.
So, Expedia and its associated companies say, "This call may be recorded for quality control purposes," and that did not work in this case. Good that they are making it right, but it only takes a few things like this on social media to sink a company. It is not enough to do our best; sometimes we have to do what is required: Winston Churchill
"When she finally was able to get an Expedia supervisor on the phone, he said records showed she had canceled her flights and she says he accused her of lying." - as written on KABC site. What irritates me the most is that the supervisor exhibited what appears as a typical "corporate defense". The fact that a disgruntled CSR who received a bad review canceled the ticket is bad, but I sort of understand why it happened: There could be "rogue" employees at any company. (I don't know - maybe they loose a bonus if they get a bad review.) But when a CS supervisor starts defending his subordinates, especially in such an outrageous case, most likely with a good paper trail left behind, - that's an indication of a bad training and bad company policies at some level. Such a situation creates a feeling of lawlessness. One does not have to go to Facebook to resolve this type of issues. While it looks like the CEO handled the damage control well, he's got a really big job ahead of him: to fix the problem, not just the symptoms. I wouldn't expect to see anything close to such a situation, say, from Zappos.
I am not a big Facebook fan, but in this case I'm quite sure that without the wide exposure that Facebook can have there's no way a top executive would have intervened, apologized and remedied the situation. I can only hope that somebody gets fired over this.