Complaint Review: FareMart

Had a group reservation with my team on United to Hawaii, but the morning of the flight I had to go to the ER, and didn’t get discharged until after the flight departed. I scrambled to get rescheduled through United Airlines via Google and somehow got routed to this company that is intentionally deceitful in masquerading as a United Airlines reservations department.

I asked the rep I connected with to be put onto the next flight, and after giving my information over to them, I noticed that the confirmation e-mail came through a company called FareMart. I immediately asked the representative if I was speaking to United Airlines, and he said yes. They did not mention who they were, they did not even say their name. Issue number one, being intentionally deceitful or skirting the lines of truth with the customer.  They are NOT United Airlines or in any way related to them.

I thought, okay, I’m desperate to get on this flight, I’ll shell out the $450 to reschedule later that day and proceed from there.  The agent asks me if I want to keep my return flight with the group, I told him yes, keep the same flight and reservation.

On my flight back, I get to the airport and run into an issue. Turns out my reservation on the return flight was marked as invalid because I didn’t take my original flight. I spent an hour and a half with the United team in Hawaii trying to figure out the different e-mails and reservations. Finally, after a lot of begging and a few calls to corporate, they approved me to take the original flight back to Los Angeles on my old reservation that my company had booked.

The staff on ground at United also told me that they have a “flat tire policy” which allows for free rescheduling 2 hours before and 1 hour after a flight, which I qualified for, and that I must’ve been scammed into over-paying for something

So instead of even just charging an agent fee for rescheduling a flight (which had $0 cost anyways), they decided to take advantage of my situation.

Come to find out that they didn’t actually reschedule my original flight like I had requested, they purchased a brand new seat (The United rep told me that my reservation said that I did not show up for my original flight and no changes had been made to my account) The sales rep at FareMart told me that they only had one seat on the rescheduled flight to pressure me to purchase a seat, and I stepped on the plane to find it 75% empty. This is probably the reason why I wasn’t able to take my return flight, because it didn’t look like I flew into Hawaii on the first flight.

Now, for the customer service portion of this fiasco.

I call right when I land back in LA and ask to get connected to a manager to see if we could get this mess sorted out, and get passed to someone named Reuben. He’s empathetic, and understanding, says he will get to the bottom of the situation and help me out. He asked for the best time to call me and I said noon the next day.

Come noon, he misses the call, so I call back in. I get a guy named David(? it started with a D), and it’s a completely other story. He tells me he’s a “superior” and that Reuben won’t be in for two days.

I tell him the situation and instead of being any sort of helpful, his tone was mocking and he didn’t seem to care. He also wouldn’t pass me to another rep when he got heated with me and talked down to me, saying “I’m going to do whatever I’m going to do” regardless of if he was helping me or not, when I told him I wanted to file a report.

I ended the conversation with him because it was so exhausting, and because he kept saying he would check recordings and with internal departments, but never gave me a follow-up process or next steps.

I don’t know where I stand with the company or what will happen next, but let this serve as a warning (that I paid $450 for) to everyone else that this company that has been “working with thousands of customers for 15 years” is OUT TO GET YOU.

Save yourself the time and the money, and the massive headache.

Triple check what numbers you’re actually dialing.

Stay away from FareMart!