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(c) Elliott Publishing.

Turn Your PC Off
ChrisCrossings · December 23, 1999

Q: I bought four airline tickets for myself and my family from an airline Internet site. The next day I canceled them and the airline will only give me credit, not a refund, and is demanding a $50 a ticket cancellation fee. Is there no time period at all for changing flight plans?

-- Norman Cohn

A: Once the airline has your credit card number on the Internet, you're playing by its rules. And if you've bought a nonrefundable, nonchangeable ticket, as it appears you have, you're lucky to even be getting credit. Technically, the carrier could take your money and run.

Buying a ticket from an airline Internet site can be an exciting experience, because you get to be your own travel agent. As you sit at your PC, smugly surfing from one Web site to the next, it's easy to forget that agents didn't learn what they know overnight (heck, a few of them are still trying to figure out the ins and outs of Sabre, a mystifyingly counterintuitive reservations system).

The carriers' Internet storefronts intentionally leave you with the feeling that 1) you can do it yourself and avoid paying a pesky travel agent commission; and 2) you're in control at all times.

Yeah, right.

Not to belabor the point, but check out a few of my favorite airline Web sites - American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United - to get a good idea of what I'm talking about. It looks so easy, doesn't it?

It's important to keep the airline's motives in mind. By making you feel good about your self-booking prowess, and by leaving you with the impression that you're saving money by skipping the middleman, you're being lulled into a false sense of security. The sole purpose of an Internet travel site, as columnist David Kirby suggested recently, is to make money.

I believe that in glossing over the fine print - where it says that you must be traveling when there's a blue moon in order to get your money back - these sites can actually end up doing you a disservice and costing you a bundle. By being short on disclaimers and long on promises of bonus mileage and price breaks, the carriers weave a seductive Web that's designed to line their pockets.

There's nothing wrong with making money, but it doesn't seem fair that an airline would take your hard-earned cash just like that, without so much as a disclaimer, and then have the audacity to ask for more.

In this case (and I can't believe I'm actually writing this) you should have used an honest-to-goodness human travel agent. Real agents often have a few days between the time they book a nonrefundable ticket and the time they debit the tickets in which can cancel the trip without incurring any penalties. They can also show you nifty tricks like hidden cities and back-to-back ticketing (that's a subject for another column.)

If you'd skipped the Internet and bought your tickets through a retailer, you probably could have avoided all of this trouble.

I'm not saying you should never shop for travel online again. Just choose how you buy your trips carefully. There's a time and a place to book in cyberspace - and a time and place to leave your computer turned off.

Christopher Elliott's column appears on Thursdays. All e-mailed questions to ChrisCrossings become property of Ticked.com and may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. You may reach Elliott at chris@ticked.com. Or visit his home page at http://www.elliott.org.