A few weeks ago I made reservations on cfare.com for our flights from Beijing to Shanghai, three business class tickets, and got our confirmation numbers online. All was well, heard nothing back from them about any problems and my credit card was charged for all three tickets.

Imagine the joy when we get to the airport that morning and there's no reservations, no e-tickets, no nothing. And we speak no Chinese. The 14 year old was crying and my partner panicked; an hour of work with China Eastern and we found that the reservations were cancelled by cfares on the 22nd of September, six days before our flights! They told us nothing whatsoever and would have been perfectly happy to strand us in Beijing.

We finally heard back from them after complaining very loudly, and they told me that they couldn't issue electronic tickets, and had no way to reach me (no phone, e-mail, or physical address) in order to get us paper tickets. Somehow they had all three of these to charge my credit card, just not to let me know that they'd destroyed our reservations.

Beware!