jcwoman

I only did a quick search, so may have missed similar complaints, but...

I bought tickets IAD-BOS yesterday on Jetblue's website, and am befuddled by the bad customer experience of the process. I'm curious if anybody else has had the same experience.

I selected my outbound and inbound flights and was quoted a price for the round trip total. Went to the next page and entered the names and contact info of my friend and I and chose seats. Went to the third page and entered my billing information. Clicked on the button to book and it processed for a minute and then told me my flights were no longer available and to choose other flights.

Because there is no navigation directly to parts of the booking process, even though there is a little graphic on the top showing the "stages", I started over. Minor peeve: crappy navigation.

Chose the exact same flights as before, only the prices were slightly higher. Went through all of the same pages as above and then my booking was successful. So in a nutshell the price changed while I was in the booking process and instead of giving me the price quoted, it lied and said my flights were unavailable and forced me to start over to get the new price. That's pretty obnoxious.

FLIHGH

This happens often. They say that somebody else bought the same exact flight as you did at the same time and took the last seats at that price.

sbm12

And on other airlines/OTAs as well. You're not holding that seat inventory until you actually book it. If someone else grabs it instead you lose.

Often1

Same thing on UA, DL & AA, as well as most other carrier sites. There are thousands of people on the website at any given point and someone booked the last two seats at OP's price before OP completed and paid for his ticket. That jacked the price.

Nothing wrong with the website, simply the confluence of supply & demand and DOT rules (pricepoint set at time of payment) unless carrier chooses to allow holds.

diburning

I haven't had this problem, but since we're on the topic of website problems, I've had a few. The "Where We Jet" page fails to load half the time. When I try to book a ticket, I can input BOS in the left, and then whatever I input on the right for destination fails to populate the box. I type and click, and the box remains blank. To get around it, I have to go to the "Where We Jet" page (which doesn't work half the time) and set up my origin and destination there. I've tried this in multiple browsers, all with the same result.

Ace Cdn

I am not sure I would classify this as bad customer service. I have had it before on different websites where the price was no longer available due to someone else snagging the last seat. I do have to say that a more friendly way of doing it is saying that price is no longer available do you want to book at the new price.

jcwoman

It's never happened to me when booking on UA or AA's websites, however that could be entirely coincidental.

My complaint wasn't so much about losing the initial price, as the way it described the failure to book as something different than what it was. And also the fact that the site had no easy navigation to allow me to fix the issue, and instead I had to start from scratch including re-typing in all of my passenger contact and billing information. Computer system UI's are a big soapbox issue for me, as is customer service in general.