If You Try to Book through Online Agency for Hotel or Air Ticket, Here’s My Experience

doyouknowit on 13/12/2019 - 16:04
Last edited 13/12/2019 - 16:09

This article is for your reference only.

My rule to buy normal airline ticket is, if I can get similar price from the website directly, I will not go for online agency.

At the beginning of this article, watch out following situation:

  1. The flight price search website ownership - you might use skyscanner quite a lot, but do you know the ownership of the website has been purchased by a online travel agency to attract more customers. You could think whether such closer relationship can still provide you objective information to choose your agency.

  2. After you purchased the ticket from an agency, does it provide you airline issued eticket pdf or just a confirmation generated by their system. It doesn’t mean you need to worry about they didn’t purchase the ticket for you, you need to rethink whether they have a good system linked to the airline to acquire the timely information.

  3. Can you find your booking on the airline website by the reference provided by them. Watch out for those agencies told you the ticket is fine, but they don’t have the correct reference. Even it is true, I will not use them the next time because travel is all about peace of mind to me.

Someone might think the closer relationship to airlines or bargain power of online travel agencies can provide you more service. To me, it is doubtful.

  • online agencies are just like retailers of products, above them, could be ticket wholesalers or airlines. If the ticket is purchased through a wholesaler from them, there could be more fee to change to cancel the ticket due to the middle man will charge you.

  • even it’s a ticket purchase through airline from an agency, you need to watch out for whether or not they provide you services in time. For example, does it take a long time to change your ticket or to add service, if it is so, it might indicate they don’t have a direct system to change or add more service for you, the customer services on the other end also might need to call the airline on your behalf. It could be a loss to you if you are in a emergency and if you don’t want some misunderstood happened when passing the information through a middle man. Same apply to the tickets purchase from wholesaler.

Some other trouble may happen

  • when you want to change a ticket with airline directly, but they let you call your agency because it an agency purchase

  • in emergency, the agency don’t want to cover your loss by telling you they are merely an agency, you need to contact the airline

So there’s no point to me to buy a ticket from an agency if airline offers the same price

—————————————————————————————————

Hotel

Sometimes, customers cannot avoid to book hotel from agencies because hotel price could be cheaper through agencies but:

  1. Make sure you call the hotel to reconfirm the booking after the agency confirmation sent to you

  2. Watch out any remark says it’s a booking through hotel partners(it means it’s not a direct booking with hotel, but through another agency or wholesaler). When you want to change or cancel for this kind of booking, no matter how bad the situation is, normally if the hotel cannot do anything because it is through a agency’s agency, it will be troublesome.

  3. Watch out the agency told you even the booking is confirmed, the hotel cannot find the booking until some like point of time. If you have received the confirmation for a few days and it’s happened, normally it indicates the hotel really doesn’t have the booking, and it’s a booking through agency’s partners who don’t want to send your booking to the hotel now because they are still waiting for some last minute cheaper price(my assumption ) to get more profit.

Thanks for reading.

Travel

Comments

  • Bonbi on 13/12/2019 - 16:53
    +2

    Not sure what the point of this is, but thanks for sharing your experience I suppose.

    • doyouknowit on 13/12/2019 - 17:15

      You are welcome, because it’s too ez for those online company to attract people’s attention but sometimes hard to solve any problem when things happened

  • crentist on 13/12/2019 - 16:55

    Most frustrating thing is when you can't even get a response. This seems to happen more with small online agents or crappier full-service airlines with bad websites. When something goes wrong and you are stuck dealing with a buggy website and unresponsive staff, that's when holidays turn absolutely miserable.
    At least with the low cost carriers, you expect to get screwed on comfort, hidden fees, and strict booking conditions. But they usually have pretty decent websites and some army of underpaid foreign call staff to quickly tell you how you are being screwed, and how much money will instantly fix it.

    Worst was being told by airport staff during the outward leg of a flight that I may not have a valid visa for the terrible return transit I had booked. It was very grey (turns out visa was fine) so I contacted the online agency immediately to check, and see if I could rebook anything so be safe. They responded about 2 weeks later, a day or two before the return flight, to say that the ticket couldn't be changed, and completely ignored questions about the visa.
    Travelgenio, stay well away from those lazy useless pricks.

    • doyouknowit on 13/12/2019 - 17:26

      The visa issue, even it’s number one or two biggest agencies in the world I don’t think they can cover this topics very well because the buyers are from different counties fly to different counties, sometimes ground staff intervened due to they think they have discretion or they lack of knowledge.

      If visa goes wrong, my experience is agencies will not provide timely solution because

      • if it’s airline staff mistake, they will tell you to negotiate with airline directly
      • if the buyer didn’t know they need visa, they will let the buy bear the loss

      They will tell you they are not the airline they cannot change policy normally

      My suggestion is

      • even the agency didn’t warn about visa requirement always do a check before fly
      • if possible buy tickets with more flexible policy even something happened there s still a chance with some cost
      • crentist on 13/12/2019 - 18:50

        Sure, I wasn't expecting them to have much answers tbh, and I ended up contacting the airline and confirming with immigration staff at the airport overseas. And I had also already checked the visa before booking and it seemed okay, but slightly vague.

        The issue was that I had a weird return flight that relied on a Chinese visa transit exemption. And on the outbound flight airline staff thought it was strange and suggested I check while in China on my initial transit. And those guys said I couldn't do it. They were all wrong, but it gave me a decent scare.

        It wasn't a big problem at the time because I was coming home to visit family for a lazy holiday so arranging visas in a rush would have been easy, plus parents worked in travel for many years so they know the rules better than most, plus my partner could speak Chinese directly with airport staff overseas for that extra sense of security.

        But the website didn't even acknowledge the question, let alone attempt to address it or point me in the right direction. I could have easily been an inexperienced traveler in a new country with places to go and no support, expecting any help from my "travel agent". Even just the confirmation that I was definitely stuck with the ticket would have still been useful, if there had been time to do anything with that info.

        • doyouknowit on 13/12/2019 - 19:44

          since the air tickets price is so transparent among different website, the profit has been actually squeezed down to a little. The agencies could focus more on volume simply instead of good service. They attract customers from airline tickets to sell other products like hotel or travel point tickets.

          After you paid and got your tickets and want to have more services, if they have the option to redirect you to the airline, I think they will do it immediately.

          To help the sale, they might hide the warning somewhere in the spoiler without any due diligence. Some home brewed website might not even bother to provide least useful information.

          I just say it’s just useless, lucky enough if in a typical phone call, some experienced traveler customer service staff would give me some useful advice from their experience not the agency general frequent question template.

          As to the airline or ground staff opinion, it’s complex, for certain policies they are not sure of, they might provide you some worst case scenario as their disclaimer for later on accountability I assumed.

  • dasher86 on 13/12/2019 - 18:08
    +1

    Man that was hard to read.
    Do us all a favour and put it through grammarly.

    • doyouknowit on 13/12/2019 - 18:17
      -3

      I tpyed it on my pohne I’m lazy haha

  • PissLUR on 13/12/2019 - 18:28
    +1

    I don't see the need to call the hotel to re-confirm bookings. why? have never done this in the past.

    • doyouknowit on 13/12/2019 - 19:13

      It’s because normally if you prepaid the hotel to the agency possible situation is like:

      • agency have direct system locked the room with the hotel and send your information there timely

      • agency send email to notify the hotel reservation team it’s has been prepaid, and hotel will lodge the book for you, as long as the hotel reservation team is on duty, the booking can be found on their end very soon

      • agency might have the allotment contract with the hotel, but for some reason, the room isn’t the available even the agency sent you the confirmation but the hotel end will refused the booking later on and agency will inform you. If it takes a while, the room price might not be the same if you book again.

      • agency booked you through their partner, they have a contract for instant confirmation which is the agency sent to you, but its partner might process the booking manually which has a delay to let the hotel confirm it or the partner doesn’t want to send the booking to the hotel now for some reason of profit.

  • iforgotmysocks on 13/12/2019 - 21:25

    Neat.

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