Complaint Review: Cheap Tickets - Colorado Springs Colorado

I have worked at Cheap Tickets for 3 years and my opinion has drastically changed in that time. Many problems came when Cendant bought out Cheap Tictets with the intent of eventually doing away with most or all of the phone reservations and moving toward an on-line business.

Here are the reasons that I would advise you to avoid

Cheap Tickets.

There are two types of fares, published and bulk(contracted).

The published are available to purchase from anyone, including directly from the airline. The bulk fares are what made Cheap Tickets what it is. These fares are contracted through the airline at a reduced rate. Sounds good, but be warned that they are becoming less common as time passes. When a bulk fare is purchased it is non-refundable and to make changes requires that the new fare is also bulk fare. With my experience, I didn't ever make a successful bulk fare change because there are so few available. The last point about the fares are when a published fare is purchased, Cheap Tickets follows the rules of the airline for the fare but adds an additional 50.00 per person to change. Even if the airline can cancel the reservation within the first 24 hours, Cheap Tickets will still charge 50.00 per person.

My second point about why Cheap Tickets should be avoided is the training that the employees are offered. In my 3 week training class to move from Reservations to Internet Support, we spent most of the time sitting around solving puzzles and talking. When time came to take live calls, my class realized that most of the information needed was learned from trial and error. The airlnes often make changes to their existing rules and follow up training was non-existent. So if you call for help due to the web site and have a bad experience with information that is inconsistent, here is the most likely cause.

The last point is on how difficult it is to correct a problem. I have seen countless people getting screwed out of their money. One example is when a girl called after booking a reservation on-line. She received an error message that the reservation did not go through. She tried again and this time it was successful. She checked the e-mail in the morning and had two confirmations. We were not able to cancel on without a few because they were ticketed about 8 hours apart. I ended up speaking with 3 leads before one was able to pull up information on when the reservations were sent through. They were about 2 minutes apart. This example shows two of the problems, many of the employees do not want to take the time to propelry help the customers...it would hurt the so important stats, and second the core system used is called Galileo and uses a limited work surface call Viewpoint. Because the company will only teach how to use the work surface, very few employees are actually trained to look up additional information that is required of the job.

In conclusion, what I recommend is to use the Cheap Tickets web site as a search engine, but do not actually book with them. Since the contracted rates a not very common, you can usually pinpoint the best deal and call the airline direct or use the airlines website. What is even worse it booking through the phone, there are numerous fees that can be avoided through teh airline. Cheap Tickets is not a fraudulant company, but you may end up paying more in the end. The problems mentioned have come about since Cendant bought Cheap Tickets out.

Ex employee

Colorado Springs, Colorado
U.S.A.