TRAVAUDACITY

Lost my dad a few weeks back. As we all know, the passing of a parent is not a fun time. Emotional issues aside (easier said than done), for those of us that don’t live in the same area, we are also faced with a huge travel challenge that has to be conquered in a big hurry.

Have ya tried booking flights less than a few days away? You know as well as I that it’s gonna be expensive as shit. But still, under these conditions, ya gotta do it, and you find a way.

My wife and I thought we had found a way. As soon as we found about the funeral arrangements on the day after my dad passed away, we arbitrarily used Travelocity to select two round-trip flights from Los Angeles to a Southern destination, about a 2-hour drive from where my dad was born and raised, and where the funeral service would be held.

Cost (with rental car): about $1300. Da-yum. But still, ya gotta do it.

We would be arriving the day before the funeral; the viewing would be held the evening of our arrival. We were set — or so we thought.

We received the standard acknowledgement e-mail almost immediately after we initially chose the flights. This was not a reservation confirmation, it said, typical of the process for an online travel service. But it listed all the details of our flights and looked pretty damned official. We figured we were on our way.

I’ve used travel web sites successfully fairly often since the Internet came along. Never had a problem. Never had ‘em say “Oops, we can’t do that.”

So it’s no surprise that we didn’t sit by the computer to wait for the follow-up confirmation e-mail to arrive. Maybe we shoulda. But then, what if it doesn’t arrive and you just get nothing… for a few hours?

I’m damn sure not booking another flight until I know for a fact I need to, since it would likely cost a nice chunk o’ cash — per flight — to cancel one or the other. So we forgot about it. We had other things going on, you might say.

The next morning — about 12 hours after we initially made the reservation — my wife gets an e-mail saying “Please contact us regarding” said reservation. Turns out, as they later described, in the time it took Travelocity to book the rental car part of the package, those seats were sold and the package deal was gone.

12 fucking hours it took them to tell us this. Normally, 12 hours wouldn’t be a big deal, but with only three days before we are supposed to fly out, 12 hours — the next day, in this case — is huge. Now we’re one day closer to the funeral. It would cost even bigger bucks at that point, since fares increase drastically in the days before any given flight. And this time would be no different.

Both my wife and I talked to the nimrods at Travelocity on the phone, but to no avail. The seats were gone. Or, I should say, those seats were gone.

Turns out there were other seats on the very same flights. Book those for you instead? Sure, they said. That’ll be another $1000. Grand total: $2300 for two round-trippers from L.A. to Jackson, Mississippi.

No shit. (Two tickets for the same destination for a month from now start at less than $600 for both, according to the Travelocity site right now.)

Spoke to a supervisor. “Steve,” he said his name was. OK, sure, let’s go with that. All he really said was that he was sorry, that he understood my frustration and that he would check with his crew as to why it took them 12 hours to tell us our seats weren’t available. That was about all he said. Repeatedly.

Yeah, thanks, Steve-In-Quotation-Marks. Unfortunately, his understanding did nothing to change the skyrocketing air fares we were facing.

I told him that, since they screwed up, he should go ahead and let us have those other seats on the same flights for the original cost. I’d even forego the rental car for the same amount. I mean, c’mon, we were traveling to my father’s funeral. Cut us a break.

Nope, he said. No can do, dead daddy or not. Heartless bastards. The audacity was gut-wrenching.

We hung up and both my wife and I searched for other flights for the same departure date, but the best we could do was $1800 for some two-layover red-eye flights. No, thanks.

[In case you’re wondering, despite what you may have seen on Seinfeld a few years ago, bereavement fares are quite rare. Only one airline offers them, we were told. It’s a 30% discount, but you can only book them up to three days in advance. We tried, but very few flight options were available on that airline and we couldn’t find a flight that worked for us.]

The only way we could travel for a less-than-insane price was to book it for a day later than we wanted to go, which we did, and got them for roughly the same $1300 fare we had originally. No, we did NOT use Travelocity.

At first, we risked missing the viewing by going a day later, but thankfully it was moved to the next day, the same day as the funeral. It was nice that we got attend the viewing after all since I got to spend some time with relatives that I hadn’t seen in a very long time.

So… the moral of the story?

FUCK TRAVELOCITY. They are heartless, incompetent fucks. Use ‘em at your own risk. I sure wouldn’t.