holland

Keep fighting Capital One. I've had credit card disputes come back as "legitimate" once the merchant provides anything, but eventually if you refute their "evidence" enough, I've always won out. Your case will eventually escalate to someone who's capable of using logic and human thought to see your point (re: the 8/11 vs 8/13 timeline) and cover it.

Catnt2

I know this does not help Doppy or the parents. This is the exact reason I tell people NEVER book online. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Most of those online agencies have numerous negative reviews and to make up for the mistakes, they offer travel vouchers. Like someone would be crazy enough to use the company again!

Book with a legitimate Travel Agency, one that owns an agency and you can speak to, without going through a phone queue talking to someone in another country. These online agency reps do not care about you and have probably never traveled. And please read all the terms, conditions & policies of the agencies, before booking or agreeing to purchase.

Real Travel Agents (Planners, Advisors, Concierge, etc) care about you and are there to help you with your vacation. It takes a lot of training, knowledge and experience to book a custom vacation, (I'm not just talking about plane tickets). Some agencies will charge service fees, for all the work time that is put into planning a trip. Some agencies will charge fees, if you cancel a reservation, as it took a lot of time to plan the trip. The reason for this is because they are working on your behalf to give you an amazing vacation. What you may not know is that the real agency can get you better deals, than you find online. The real agency does not get paid unless you book your trip with them, as the suppliers, they book with pay the agent a commission to take care of you.

Unfortunately, the parents agreed to purchasing the tickets and agreed to the service fee if they cancelled. Therefore the online agency can rightfully charge the cancellation fee.

vlfrance

Unfortunately, with on-line service websites, it's difficult to get to a real person - or one who has all the right answers. Try eBay or Amazon! The $400 sounds like a cancellation or change fee (as Catnt2 mentions). In the site's FAQ, there's mention of these fees. If the tickets were purchased on the carrier's website directly, and changed or cancelled, an outright fee would be charged and the value of the fare would be banked for a year. It's a legitimate fee and that's Capital One's defense since they don't want to be out $400 either.

This doesn't help when it's frustrating to deal with something that should be easily explained and especially when one's loved ones are involved. I completely understand the anger and frustration. Good luck.

weblet

According to airline rules, passengers have 24 hours to cancel without penalty. The agency should have been able to void the transaction and the duplicate ticket situation at least would have been avoided if that was the case. Can’t really address the $400 penalty the agency charged, other than it should have been disclosed somewhere and if not I would dispute on that basis.

gfunkdave

And once your parents get the refund from Capital One, close all their accounts with Capital One and open accounts with better issuers. When I have had fraud with Chase or AmEx, I got immediate refunds.

petercascio

According to their site they are owned by a company called Swift Solutions, and such a company is registered in MO, but that is a special education teacher working out of her home. There is an IT company called Swift Solutions with offices in Parsippany, NJ, and Hyderabad, India, but they are an IT outsourcing firm.

The Scamadviser page listed above is misdirected, it should be www.scamadviser.com/check-website/farebooth.com.

There the company is listed as Swift IT Services, and according to the Indian Ministry of Corporate Affairs -- sometimes you have to be grateful for Indian bureaucracy -- that company ("Swift IT Services (India) Private Limited", with the company registration number U72300TG2015PTC100589) is in Hyderabad, in the south of India, while the website is registered in the city of Gurgaon in the state of Haryana, just north of the capital Delhi.

India permits only one company to use a registered name in the entire country. The name of the fake company doesn't even fulfill the requirements for Indian company names, as you can see from the real company's name. So the name in the web registration isn't a legit company, and the address is an apartment, not an office.

Finally, even though they display the ASTA, the American Society of Travel Advisors www.asta.org, logo, the association does not list them as members.

It seems to me that there are a number of new arguments you can make to Capital One, the fraudulent ASTA membership something I'd push first, and then the questionable ownership. I'd be interested in who processes their credit card payments -- under what name did the credit card charges appear on the statement?

xobile

A couple of years ago I fought with Justfly.com over this. They said they refund the full amount but the $75 they charge to refund is not covered by the law. I'm not too versed in it and didn't want to spend more time bothering with it so I left it. Of course I never booked with Justfly again, only directly on the airline website or through trusted travel agents.

scubadu

Maybe you should be trying to figure out how to take down Capital One rather than a fly by night travel agency...

Regards

trooper

This is NOT true. Airlines have a CHOICE of offering 24 hr free cancellation OR a 24 hr "hold". You will get nowhere demanding free cancellation if the airline offers the hold instead.

Doppy

Unfortunately the company made the duplicate reservation without telling anyone, and then canceled it a month later, but before the flights. My parents didn't find out about any of it until they got their credit card statement, well outside any cancellation period. My sense now is that the company screwed up (why make reservations and not tell the passenger?) and is trying to stick my parents with the bill. I found out more recently that basically the travel agent was using a consolidator, and so they were matching the $1200 fare directly available from United by charging $800 in tickets through the consolidator, and the $400 was just a fee that was the difference between the publicly available fare and what they paid the consolidator.

Thanks, I'll follow up on this.

As noted just above, the charges were in two parts. One was directly from United in the amount of $800 - United says these were booked by a travel agency called "Zoomtech." The only information they could/would give me about the agency is the phone number, which is the same as on farebooth's web site.

The $400 charge was listed on the credit card statement as "Air Travel Services NY" with the same phone number. Capital One doesn't have / won't release any more information.

I also contacted Visa Signature customer service via e-mail a couple weeks ago for assistance, and they haven't bothered to respond.

Since we're not making any progress with Capital One's fraud department - they say that because my parents gave the agency their credit card number it's "not fraud" - we sent a letter to the CEO's office to try to escalate this issue. At this point we've invested way more time in this than it's worth, but it's the principle of it.

linnet

GeezerCouple

Yes, have them cancel Capital One, and get AMEX. They are terrific on the side of their consumers.

GC