Kgmm77

One thing struck me reading this thread is that TravelUp are BA’s agent. They are, as in any principal-agent relationship, working on their behalf. Given some of the shady practices and poor customer services outlined, I’m somewhat surprised BA are not only still using them, but allow them to use “preferred partner” status. Is there no ongoing due diligence or service management framework applied to agents, or is it just as long as they keep paying, it’s all fine?

13901

Knowing full well of what I was getting myself into, I booked an itinerary on TravelUp (the discount made it really worthwhile).... and predictably I'm getting the short end of the stick with this company. Here's my experience and my honest advice is to not to buy from these guys.

• I booked a LHR-MAD-SCL-ARI & return itinerary with TravelUp. The ticket is 075 (so IB) and the actual metal is a mixture of BA and LATAM.
• The TravelUp receipt quotes £472 and change in taxes, not including their fees. Edited to add: this was the price of taxes alone, the overall ticket price was £1,500
• For various reasons, I have not used two flights on the return sector: SCL-MAD, and MAD-LHR.
• The tariff is non-refundable and that's fine with me, but usually taxes should be refundable. This is what I asked to TravelUp, since IB told me they can't do anything and I need to deal with the OTA. So I asked as much, perfectly happy if they responded that nothing was refundable.
• TravelUp has said, via email:
  • That no taxes are refundable. When I asked to know where in the T&Cs this is included, they ignored the question. I personally can't find something on this point in the T&Cs.
  • Then they said that the taxes I'm owed amount to £30 and since they have a charge of £75 to process anything, nothing is owed me (the 75 quid is indeed in the T&Cs).
  • When I asked for a tax breakdown by flight, they said they didn't have it, but the taxes on the two flights I didn't use is nonetheless £30.
  • When I asked how that is possible since a similar itinerary, on IB's website, includes £187 of taxes, they went back to the point that nothing is owed to me.

Now, this isn't about the money. If they provided a screenshot of the T&Cs confirming what they said, that'd be it for me. If they provided a breakdown of the taxes, proving that indeed only £30 was refundable, that'd have been it. But the lazy lies (and the sloppy responses) are honestly leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

Edited to add: For the avoidance of doubt, this isn't a request for help. I'm not trying to recover any sum of money from TravelUp - at least not anymore. It is just an example of how they do business and, hopefully, a warning to others not to book with them.

corporate-wage-slave

The key thing for me would be why you did not use those flights. If it was due to some fault of your own, then it would not even occur to me to ask an OTA for a refund of taxes, not even UK APD. If it was due to the airlines involved that you could not take the flight - or at least no fault of your own - then yes I can see some point. But that's an incredibly low fare to Arica, it would normally be well over £600 so it was cheap, and cheap for a reason. You got your money's worth out of what you did fly. If I was looking for the full travel agent experience then I wouldn't start with TravelUp, and I'd be paying quite a bit more. I suspect this was a pure consolidation ticket so it doesn't necessarily allow you to split it up after the flight. It's not a good example, but Ryanair regularly offers fares below APD out of the UK. You cannot realistically ring up Mr. o'Leary and ask him to refund that APD in full - it wouldn't be a long phone call and I suspect quite to the point.

plunet

Not all 'taxes' on a ticket are refundable in the case of you not flying sectors on a ticket. I am no expert but as far as I know it's government taxes that you can usually ask to have refunded, for example in the case of a UK ticket is usually just the APD and not airport taxes or fuel surcharges.

So whilst it might seem like there are £100+ of 'taxes' on the sectors you didn't fly, you need to make sure what is in that calculation.

I am personally surprised that you have got a cogent response from TravelUp stating that the taxes were £30 and because they have an admin fee of £75 to do anything then no refund is due. Unless you can easily prove that the refundable taxes were significantly more than £75 then to save you from hypertension I suggest you give up now.

13901

Hi C-W-S, I should point out that 472 were taxes and fees alone. The overall price for the ticket was £1,500 which, still, wasn't too much in the grand scheme of things but nonetheless not insignificant for me. So, to reiterate, 472 was just the taxes. I inquired about the possibility of having a partial tax refund. You mention FR: I had one booking with them, made before Covid, which I could no longer use because of the pandemic. Having heard that they were giving out vouchers I contacted Ryanair to ask if my booking was applicable. It wasn't, but they offered to refund part of the taxes...and provided a breakdown. Frankly it was a good experience.

The reason for missing the two flights is that I was involved in the rescue of two Venezuelan who were walking from the old country and I needed to stay in Arica to submit a statement. Since I hadn't formally been asked to do so, IB deemed it not to be enough for a flight change, hence why I left it out.

I'm not getting my point across, I see. I'm not disputing that the value is too low to be refunded. I find very, very, very suspicious that they can't provide a breakdowns of taxe but at the same time they can claim that the value is just £30. At my previous work, since we liked pointless bureaucracy, we had to itemise the price of a flight in both taxes and fare when doing claims. Our travel agent provided a full breakdown, by leg. And it's very strange that these guys can't. If they said "look, here's the breakdown: taxes for this flight are £30, we charge £75, no soup for you" I'd have accepted it.

And for the avoidance of doubt, I have indeed given up on this, there's no point in pursuing a few tens of pounds. Mine was just a testimony from an experience with TravelUp and how dodgy that outfit is, so that others can learn about it and go the right way - book through an airline.

corporate-wage-slave

Yes I misunderstood that in the ooriginal wording. Had I paid £472 for all that flying I would have kept a very low profile in case someone presented a bill for the correct amount! This and Crystal and a few others are in a special category of OTA, with better computers but worse customer service. In the current environment with so many cancellations not just in the UK, I would be wary anyway. They have a role - providers of bargains essentially - just so long as everything goes to plan.

orbitmic

Well done to 13901 for doing the right thing.

Unfortunately, the story illustrates what we all know about buying through OTAs vs direct. I don't think you particularly got the short end of the stick, just that buying tickets from those people is essentially fine if you are - literally - experiencing nothing unusual (you buy a flight, it's on, you fly it, and you have saved plenty of money). The moment something goes wrong, either on the itinerary's side (some flight gets cancelled or retimed) or on yours (you need to change etc), you'll quickly remember how much easier it is to get sorted when buying direct from the airline.

I do buy from (reputable) OTAs some times when prices are very different (it happens, including on BA). I did so a few weeks ago for a J trip to Australia where Expedia was giving me a public fare roughly £1500 cheaper than booking direct from the airlines and with the airline codes I wanted as opposed to too many codeshares. But in my own mind, I see it as the difference between buying insurance (ie the airline route) vs no insurance (the TA route). It doesn't mean that the insurance will cover everything, nor that no insurance means you'll always lose everything, but you do now that when buying insurance (ie booking direct) you get a lot more protection and you can complain a bit more freely if problems don't get sorted. Would I pay £1500 to insure a J trip to Australia? No way, hence the OTA choice. However, when it's a matter of paying an extra £10 on a £500 flight, or £50 on a four figure flight purchase, I often decide that I prefer the peace of mind.

Lucanesque

Wow this thread is educational! I'd never consider looking at places like Expedia for flights, I clearly need to check them out in future. Do you go direct to the website, or do you use a comparison engine (e.g. was this just through Google Flights)?

MaxFlyer

It's better to search via Google Flights or SkyScanner as they give you prices from the different OTAs as well as the airline and links to the sites.

MaxFlyer

I used TravelUP earlier in the year for the cheap business class flight to HEL where BA and AY wanted a few hundred pounds more. Luckily, I didn't have any issues with the flights or needing support from their 'customer service' agents, however, I made a mistake in buying their gold package which offered a £15 discount off your next booking with them. To this day, even after many phone calls and email discussions I still have not been able to use the discount code. Based on a Google search the codes never work online and the agents insist that there's not a problem and that I mist be doing something wrong. The overseas agents are very bad - poor customer service skills, cut the line off, rude etc.

orbitmic

I sometimes check direct and sometimes look it up (usually through Kayak. I'm sure google flights is fine too but I like the kayak interface and functionalities work for me).

If you use a comparison engine and go for whatever is cheapest, beware that not all OTAs were created equal. Some will charge you various fees on top of the price you see (though thankfully the credit card scam was outlawed by the EU a few years ago and so far that part of EU consumer protection law has been transposed in the UK too), but also some may even sell you additions of separate (and thus unprotected) tickets or even in the worst case, there have been cases of some selling award tickets.

By contrast, I find expedia decent. They tell you if they sell you a public fare or a negotiated fare, both will earn the normal avios/TPs/miles with other airlines, and if they sell you anything unusual (e.g. separate tickets) they will warn you specifically about it. I've never known if it is a PoS issue or anything, but it does happen more than occasionally that I can find, e.g. T space on flights using expedia whilst BA tells me only E or W is available (or I vs R and D), and whilst I initially worried this would be ghost availability and I would have issues with the ticket, they were always issued normally and flights took place fine.

The big issue is that if you have a schedule change/cancellation, you need to deal with it through the OTA, and that will be invariably more painful and less flexible than with the GGL (and no, you can't sweet talk your way with the GGL team for them to handle it directly, they just don't have the right to touch a ticket owned by an OTA until it goes to airport control). So as I said, I invariably favour booking direct with airlines, but if the price difference is big, and that happens, I do use OTAs.

Bluekjp

Hi, The taxes on a ticket SCL/MAD/LON are:
£20.70ZQ,. £7.50JD, £0.50OG,. £1.60QV and the non-refundable YQ £141.60
Therefore the refundable taxes are £30.30.
​​​​​​

higham44

I'm travelling to HEL tomorrow with a ticket bought through TravelUp on Finnair flying on A350. So far, so good - boarding pass issued. If all goes to plan then I am a happy camper.

13901

Thanks Bluekjp, this is what I was after! One has to wonder why it was so hard for TravelUp to do precisely what you've done, instead of beating around the bush and fobbing me off with stories on the airline.

KARFA

I have done a few of these and I haven't experienced any issues so far.

However, had there been cancellations beforehand or reasons I needed to contact TravelUP I have no doubt it would have been a PITA.