This past Sat night I booked a flight for my wife and I on Travelocity as the El Al website did not allow me to book Cairo-Tel Aviv-Cairo

Price for my flight choices was shown and I agreed to purchase, I then received my conf number.

Travelocity sends an email on Sunday asking me to call an 800 number and speak with an agent, the trip was NOT booked.

I get the email first thing this morning and call the Travelocity agent. For some reason they could not book it but after repeated trying to understand the agent for 10 minutes, she then said call them back in 5 hours to verify that the flight has been booked (call you back?, call me back is what I mentioned!). I'm guessing that Travelocity uses an offshore India based customer service center as the two customer service agents seemed to me to have an Indian accent and both were very very tough to understand.

Later today a person calls from the Travelocity booking center and claims that they can't book my fare at the price I originally agreed to on the website but can for an additional $90 if I book right now. Again, communicating was not this person's strongpoint. I said just hold it for now.

Called El Al and was able to book the original fare quoted no problem, in fact business class was only $40 more so I booked us in business class.

Called a travelocity agent to cancel the original order seeing as they were not able to book it. She said fine but that I would not get the $5 fee back. When I pointed out that the Travelocity website claimed I could get the fare I wanted, I agreed to it, but now that fact that travelocity can't honor the original agreement ALL my $ should be returned. After a few minutes on hold as she went to her supervisor, I got all my $ returned.

What a pain in the A$$.

Sorry to hear the problems. Indeed, very bad service.
I use Travelocity only to check fares, never booked! I am not even sure, if I get miles when I book through Travelocity!?!

I have 2 different experience with Travelocity.
First one was when I booked Buenos Aires - Auckland on Aerolineas. I choose the option to pick up the ticket in Buenos Aires at a Sabre travel agent. I loved the experience.

My second experience was when I wanted to book CHC-NAN, but when I called the call center to see if I can pay by 2 credit cards they wanted me to pay shipping (30$!!!!!!!) twice.

I called Qantas (their website had problems) and got the same fare but free shipping, but nz post lost the tickets and we had to do a lost ticket claim.

In your case it could be worse,
I bought a EWR-Buenos Aires ticket on Destina with a 9 month validity. When I realised that things completely broke down with my ex, I wanted to return earlier but the ticket magically changed to 3 months. Very annoying. I had to get another ticket from Auckland and it was a big mess which is on it's way to small claims court.

I have also had several negative experiences with Travelocity recently along exactly the same lines: book what seems like a reasonable itinerary online, then get a call in the late evening from someone with a strong Indian accent to say that it can't be ticketed. Once it was for a ZRH-LED flight on Pulkovo Aviation: their flights appeared on the Web site, and you could make a reservation, even though they didn't have a ticketing agreement with them. The next time, it was for an SFO-NRT-ITM that apparently didn't meet the minimum connection time at NRT. I was not able to convey the idea to the telephone agent that my destination was Osaka and that I was willing to fly to either airport, ITM or KIX. I think she didn't understand that it was possible to have two airports in one city, but I'm not sure. After a few minutes of discussion that went nowhere, I asked her to cancel the reservation, and I went to Expedia. I don't plan to do business again with Travelocity. Instead of the $0.50/hour offshore employees who speak better English than most Americans (and even study U.S. weather so that they can chat about it convincingly), they clearly went with the $0.25/hour variety.