Originally Posted by
LapLap
The OTA (trip.com, I’m a Diamond+ member) did acquiesce to CX, and in the meantime gave me the runaround over 4 days with lots of missed self imposed deadlines and broken promises to provide feedback/updates.
Your opinion that my request was reasonable helped my confidence and having been told by the OTA that the ticket couldn’t be changed I contacted CX directly by phone. I persisted, got through to a supervisor, explained my case and a compromise was found that I am entirely happy about (the alternative flight that suited us best plopped us out of the 24 hour layover window which introduced a few more taxes, these were reasonable and all other change fees were waived). CX sent me an email and I paid the taxes directly with them.
Trip.com is a little worse than Expedia when it comes to things like this. My view is that if you have status at Expedia, the level of service is on par with the level of service if you have status at one of the airlines or hotel chains, at least on dealings with hotels. They have gotten hotels to give a full refund for cancellation inside the cancellation deadline etc. for me. I havn't had to test getting them to do something completely off menu with an airline yet but they don't charge anything to cancel within the first 24 hours-ish of booking whereas trip.com charges a nominal fee.
It sounds like you got this sorted without having to do so but FYI - you can also pay CX USD60 to make changes to an agent ticket if you're in a bind. I have done this on CX and other airlines in the past when my corporate travel agent was being particularly useless.
"If you booked through a travel agent, you can make changes to your booking for a fee of USD60/HKD470 by contacting Customer Care."
https://www.cathaypacific.com/cx/en_...el-refund.html