Travel Center powered buy Expedia disappointment
My husband and I had used the AARP travel center several years ago for a complicated 3 destination trip. We had a fantastic service rep on the phone who found us great deals on flights and hotels, and clearly explained all aspects. Tonight we tried to book a 1destination trip needing flight, hotel, and car it took over 3 hours, multiple website fails, multiple phone calls to representatives who were unable to do much in the way actual assistance. After the 2nd fail we called and the rep who said the system was undergoing maintenance, this was around 5:30 PST (why didn’t the website have a notice about this vs letting customers waste their time??), and that he couldn’t assist us either. 45 min later, tried again, at that point the hotel was $200 more. Husband tried again and it seemed successful only to find out after purchase that the flight was NOT the one he’d chosen. He’d been trying to book a non-stop Delta flight leaving at early in the morning, looking at the itinerary it said we were on an 1-stop American airline flight arriving later. We called the travel center - the phone rep she said she couldn’t change anything but she could cancel the flight so that we could re-book it, or we could cancel everything but the hotel would still charge us a cancelation fee. This rep did not seem to understand the question: Since this was a ‘Bundle’ would canceling the Flight affect the price of the Hotel and Car since it was originally bought in a ‘bundle’. She never really wrapped her head around this question and continued to say she could cancel the flight - we decided to keep that longer w/layover flight because we didn’t want to jeopardize the hotel&car pricing since the Rep couldn’t help. I understand that service reps can only do what they’re allowed, and I'm guessing that the workers oversees in these centers are making a lot less money than the folks who used to do this job in the states; That seems to be the issue: that AARP has outsourced their once fantastic travel center, that stood out for it’s personalized care for AARP members, to an overseas call center that doesn’t seem to have any interest in people getting the help they need. Also there didn’t seem to be any way to share the Itinerary. My husband had wanted to email this to me so I too had it in an easy to find way vs being stuck trying to sign into the website.