Community Magazine January 2017

32 COMMUNITY MAGAZINE DAVE GORDON Y ou will likely begin planning for your trip by looking for the best airline deals. Sadly, that might be the first place you get scammed. Not exactly a great start to the perfect vacation…. Trust your gut: Beware of online sales that seem too good to be true, especially from so-called “discount rate” websites. Don’t be like one person interviewed for this article, who believed that she was hoodwinked by a travel website that promised to find her the lowest fares. In concordance with what appeared to be a routine purchase, the site warned that there would be no refunds, no exchanges, no transferable tickets, and no changes possible. The customer clicked “yes” and moved on to the next page. Then the customer was asked whether they might want to pay less, by broadening the search to include stopovers and plane transfers that could mean up to six hours between flights. Again, the customer clicked “yes,” and moved on to the next page. Payment was processed, and the site spat out a return ticket for the requested travel days – but there was just one problem. The agreed-upon stopover would land precisely fifteen minutes between flights – in a different terminal altogether. What if the initial plane was late? Wouldn’t it take more than fifteen minutes to disembark from the first plane? How would she get to the other terminal before the second plane took off? Those were the questions the customer was now infuriatingly asking herself. Without a doubt, she’d be stuck at Chicago’s O’Hare airport with no way to make it to St. Louis. So she did what anyone might do in her situation; she wrote an email of complaint to the company to rectify the problem. Unfortunately, in a twelve-line letter, “customer service,” curtly reminded her that she did, after all, agree that there would be no refunds, no exchange and no changes. There was nothing they could do about it now. She wrote another email, insisting that her ticket was unusable, but another version of the same letter was issued. Taking it a step further, she complained to MasterCard, through which the purchase was made. The credit card company agreed that the “economic contract” she’d signed with them was built upon the concept that they’d always sell her a usable product. Her flight en route to St. Louis was null and void if she wouldn’t be able to follow through with her plans. Luckily, she received a full refund from MasterCard. But the service agent there had sobering words for her. Apparently, she was one among many who had been bamboozled by the same company by way of problems just like this. She hadn’t been the only one to demand a refund for an unusable ticket. Admirably, this customer persisted in the quest to get her money back, despite getting rebuffed by two letters from the website. One can only wonder how many people never bothered to report the scam to the credit card company, deterred by the same correspondence. As for the website itself – those who ran it may have been counting on their “no exchanges, no refunds policy” to scare away any complaints. Perhaps they thought frustrated customers might shrug, believe issues like this were a freak occurrence and purchase the other part of their ticket elsewhere. The seat for the second leg Now that winter is upon us, many families start planning their winter vacation get away – a time when, free of worry, they can finally take a load off, and recharge. Unfortunately, it’s also the time of year when scam artists (as if what they do is an ‘art’) come out in full force, preying upon innocent tourists, who may not realize they are victims of rip-offs until it’s too late. HOW TO AVOID GETTING SCAMMED TRAVEL SAVVY: