Originally Posted by
tobsw
Is this another "I am entitled to" thread?
[...]
You had a booking, but that booking was never attached to a ticket (= never paid). And I don't believe you did not know that...
I have no reason to care whether you believe me, but just out of curiosity, why don't you? I had absolutely nothing to gain from this situation, and in fact it cost me a decent amount of money and a lot of stress. I had no ax to grind with IB - as mentioned in my previous post, I actually wanted to use them for this trip over my wife's objections.
If feeling like someone from the airline could have called me when the credit card attempt to charge the taxes didn't go through makes me "entitled," I guess I'll cop to that. But is it really "entitled" to expect a company as big as IB to treat their customers with that tiny amount of consideration? No other business I know of would do that.
Originally Posted by
tobsw
Having said that... I'm sorry you have been through this just because you didn't pay your booking.
Just to clarify, the only part of the payment that didn't go through on the credit card was the taxes ($40.40). The actual ticket was paid for with Avios, and I did see that they were debited from my account after I made the reservation. In retrospect, that is probably part of the reason no alarms ever went off in my head that there could be a problem - as far as I could see from those Avios being spent, the transaction was complete. You could possibly argue that I should have seen that no charge for the taxes ever came up on my credit card statement, but the absence of a small charge like that from a statement that typically has a couple hundred entries is not easily noticed.
Originally Posted by
tobsw
IbPlus IS a fantastic program if you know what you do - and as craigthemif and many other here always say, IbPlus is not the program for partner redemptions. But it depends on your expectations: don't have high expectations and everything goes smoothly. Their customer service is so-so if you don't speak Spanish. It can be very helpful and agents can go-the-extra-mile if you speak Spanish.
Well, you have fun with it. My opinion is quite different. And thanks for the tip about their agents being discriminatory - maybe that's why they wouldn't give me the time of day. Can you imagine if a U.S. carrier got a reputation for giving better customer service to English-speaking customers than Spanish-speaking customers? There'd be holy h3ll to pay!