Just As I Was Becoming Less Cynical About The World, I Discovered The “Travelocity Guarantee.” Back To Square One.

I’ve been using Travelocity to book flights quite a bit lately because Travelocity bookings earn two extra points per dollar through the Chase Ultimate Rewards mall.  So in addition to the two points per dollar I’d normally earn on travel purchases with my Sapphire Preferred card, I earn an additional two points per dollar by simply accessing Travelocity through Chase’s Ultimate Rewards portal.  I’ve always considered this to be a fairly riskless proposition: since 2009, Travelocity and its competitors have offered the same fares as airlines offer for direct bookings (i.e., no booking fees are charged), and airlines honor elite status and award frequent flier miles for purchases made through online travel agencies (unlike hotels, which typically do not honor elite status or award loyalty points for stays reserved through online travel agencies).

So if I can purchase the same flight at the same price through Travelocity, and earn a higher kickback by doing so, why not?  The answer, or at least one of the answers, as I recently discovered, is that if you book a flight through Travelocity and the fare on that flight is subsequently reduced, you are – for lack of a more technical term – screwed.

I recently booked two tickets on Hawaiian Airlines for my upcoming honeymoon through Travelocity.  Each ticket, at the time, cost $1,040, and was subsequently offered – six days later – for $840.  So I overpaid by a total of $400, which hurts.

This is not the first time that I have booked a nonrefundable fare that was subsequently reduced, but in each prior instance, I had booked the ticket directly through the airline and the airline offered me a credit for the difference between the fare that I booked and the lower fare that it subsequently offered.  I did have to catch the reduction and request a voucher from the airline, but, upon request, I was issued a credit for the fare difference.

Update: Many airlines charge a change fee that may partially or entirely negate the amount of the refund; an airfare tracking tool, Yapta, synthesizes many airlines’ policies here.  That said, airline representatives may be willing to waive these fees, as was apparently the case in my situation described below.

I figured that this was Hawaiian Airlines’ policy as well, so I placed a call to the airline to confirm my assumption, in case I needed to call the bluff of an unhelpful or uninformed Travelocity representative.  The representative confirmed that Hawaiian Airlines’ policy is to would have issued a credit to me if I had booked the tickets directly through the airline.

Update: Although the representative explicitly stated that I would have received a $400 credit if I had booked through the airline, Hawaiiain Airline’s policy appears to call for a $100 change fee per ticket, thus reducing my credit to $200.  I can only assume that the representative I spoke with was willing to waive the change fee, though she made no mention of a fee waiver.

With this information, I called Travelocity to request that they process the credit that I would have received if I had booked directly through the airline itself.  This turned out to be a long and agonizing process, involving multiple overseas representatives and supervisors who were all ill-equipped to handle my inquiry.  But in the interest of avoiding a long-winded rant about Travelocity’s atrocious customer service, I’ll spare you the details.  Suffice to say that I got nowhere, and I was effectively penalized to the tune of $400 for booking through Travelocity.

But what really bothers me about the whole situation is that Travelocity misleadingly promotes itself as a means of preventing this precise type of misfortune through its “Travelocity Guarantee.”  You’ve seen those commercials with the little gnome who presumably follows Travelocity customers on their travels and then interjects to their delight to enforce the “Travelocity Guarantee,” haven’t you?

What about that “Guarantee”?  Shouldn’t it help me here?  It certainly would seem applicable to my situation, given that very first purported benefit of the Guarantee that’s touted on Travelocity’s website (“The Price,” below) is precisely the situation that I found myself in:

Travelocity Example

“The Price” example is a dead ringer, right?

Wrong.  Although I indeed found a “qualifying lower rate” after I made my booking (this much was conceded by the Travelocity representatives), I was told that I did not “complete the guarantee form in a timely manner.”

There’s the rub.

A “timely manner,” as defined by Travelocity, is “within 24 hours of your booking” even if the subsequent rate reduction took place more than 24 hours after your booking.  So even though I called Travelocity within 15 minutes of “find[ing] a qualifying lower rate” and “complete[d] the guarantee form” immediately after the calls (as an admittedly pathetic form of protest), those actions were not “timely” in Travelocity-speak.

To me, this practice of promoting the “Travelocity Guarantee” as a supplemental benefit of booking with Travelocity, while failing to mention the crucial 24-hour limitation in any consumer-facing advertising – which effectively renders the “Guarantee” to be a burden as compared to the policy that would otherwise prevail if a consumer purchased airfare directly through an airline – seems patently misleading.  It’s akin to a car dealership touting a supplemental warranty on all vehicles that it sells in its consumer-facing advertising, and then providing, in the terms and conditions of its sales contracts, that the supplemental warranty is only valid during the first week of ownership and that the 10-year warranty that would otherwise accompany the vehicle is void.

And to think that Travelocity brazenly markets this policy as “the Most Comprehensive Guarantee in the Industry”!

Most Comprehensive

So I’ll consider this a lesson learned, and book my flights directly through the airlines from this point forward.  Even for a points fanatic like myself, an extra two points per dollar isn’t worth forfeiting a credit in the event of a fare reduction.

Side note:  Expedia appears to have a nearly identical policy to Travelocity, and Orbitz appears to have a slightly better “Price Assurance” policy: if a lower fare is booked through Orbitz for the exact same flight(s) that you previously purchased at a higher price, Orbitz will issue you “Orbucks” in the amount of the difference.  This policy obviously requires a lot of prerequisites to be satisfied before a credit is issued, but at least a credit is possible in certain situations.

  • Adamjasonwhite

    Wow, that’s pretty crazy. Great advice!

    • John777

      When fares are reduced, airlines have credited the difference to you?

      I thought they’d only do this minus the change fee, which oftentimes makes it a losing proposition. Curious to hear more about your experience with this.

      • David

         Hi John,

        Yes, this has happened to me (albeit with much smaller fare differences) twice in the past — I believe on U.S. Air and Delta, but both instances were years ago so my memory is fuzzy.  I’m not sure whether this is their official policy, but both times I brought the issue to a customer service rep, I was issued a credit.  And in the instance I write about here, I actually called Hawaiian to confirm that it was their policy to issue these credits.

    • David

       Thanks Adam!

  • Why don’t you take them to small claims court? Although IANAL, I suspect you will win. Their reading of the language is clearly obtuse.

    • David

      Hah, I had never heard of that “I Am Not A Lawyer” acronym!  I am a lawyer and have litigated false advertising cases, so the thought certainly has crossed my mind, though I was thinking of referring the issue to the National Advertising Division (a division of the BBB), which may choose to investigate the issue.  NAD decisions do not have the force of law but are typically complied with because the NAD can refer non-compliant advertisers to the FTC. 

  • Jamie

    It sounds like the orbitz guarantee may have changed since our trip to the uk last year. We were informed that a qualifying flight was booked on orbitz by someone else, so we would be getting the fare difference. I was delighted and looking forward to a big check, since there were five of us on the booking. We did get a check, in real dollars, for about $45! Wow, so I got back a whole 45 of the almost 5000 dollars I spent. I think you only get the fare difference and no tax or fee difference, which is the bulk of a transatlantic flight cost.
    But, it was seamless and I had to do absolutely nothing other than deposit the check.

    • David

      Wow, yep it must have changed a bit, because now you get “Orbucks” rather than cash, and Orbucks are described as “hotel credits you can use on Orbitz.” according to the FAQ here:

      https://faq.orbitz.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/7551/~/how-does-orbitz-price-assurance-work%3F

      … So Orbucks are apparently restricted to hotel bookings on Orbitz, which is another interesting wrinkle, as hotel bookings earn much higher margins for travel agencies like Orbitz than flight bookings.

      Re: the difference in fees, fuel charges and the like, those probably wouldn’t change even if the base fare does.