Last night I called the gold line to book a CW flight+car package for a short ski holiday in Colorado next winter. The reason for wanting to book it as a holiday was so that I could pay only a £350 deposit now and the balance in the new year. The reason for wanting to book over the phone was due to the ability of having a 24 hours cooling off period, which is not granted for holiday bookings on the website.
Just to make sure the representative and I were on the same page, I asked him to confirm a few things.
- That there was would be no service fee for booking a holiday over the phone. He had to double check that and asked me if I was based in the UK or in the US. I inferred that the answer may be different based on your country of residence or POS.
- That there would be a 24 hour cooling off period. Initially he said no, but when I mentioned that I was pretty sure that I had read it on the website, he went away to double check with his team and he confirmed that I was right.
- That I could upgrade with Avios at the time of booking. Once again, initially he said no, but after checking with his team, he confirmed that he would be able to do it.
I have to say that I wished the representative had been better informed, but kudos to him for not being stubborn and taking seriously that fact that it sounded like I knew what I was talking about.
He then took the flight and car detail, but when he tried to price it, he obtained a quote for a total cost of £20,000. Clearly very different from what the website was quoting. I didn't give up and suggested that perhaps something was being done incorrectly, as I could not see why he wasn't able to quote the same price. Initially he suggested that he could try to sort it out offline and call me back, but it was midnight already and I was afraid that the Avios seats would disappear. Eventually he said that he would get his supervisor involved.
To cut the long story short, they had to make the booking "manually" in order to force the flights in I, as his system was automatically booking both legs in J.
He also managed to process the upgrade with Avios of the inbound contextually to the booking.
All in all, it was a successful experience and I appreciated the willingness of the representative to get it sorted rather than just saying "computer says no". On the other hand, I wish he hadn't taken so long to do something that simple; it would've been incredibly frustrating if the Avios seats had gone by the time he was ready to book them.
I was cheekily hoping the the Avios for the upgrade were not going to be debited, but they were!
P.S. Final price for two people for LHR(J)-DEN-(F)LHR was £3,020 + 50,000 Avios. The car is W class SUV. Not bad!