• What's ticked?
• Accolades
• Contact us

c o l u m n s

• Cheap Charlie
• ChrisCrossings
• Err Travel
• Leocha
• Travel Notes
• Archives

On Your Own
ChrisCrossings · February 1, 2001

Q: We recently moved just north of the Bay Area in California from Arkansas, and we were looking to get back to Dallas for Christmas. We watched Travelocity and both the Delta and American Web sites for the best fares. After letting a pretty good fare go, we locked into a $420 fare on Delta's Web site. We booked with a credit card and received the confirmation Web page and e-mail from Delta saying we were booked.

About five days later I noticed the charges hadn't gone through on our credit card. I called Delta. They said our reservation hadn't gone through even though we had the printout of the Web page and the e-mail confirmation to prove it.

I talked to Delta's booking department and then customer service, but the best they could do was let us buy tickets on the same flight for $50 more per person. I told them I was tearing up my DeltaMiles card.

We immediately went back to Travelocity and checked the same times we'd been searching for three weeks from San Francisco to Dallas. We found the same flight on American through Travelocity for $321 per ticket, saving us $200 off our supposed reserved seats on Delta. What happened?

-- Rich Mullikin

A: Airfares are constantly changing. You can often get a better deal by waiting until the last minute and booking a seat on a Web site that sells so-called "distressed" inventory - tickets that would have gone unused if they aren't sold. That's probably what happened when you went to Travelocity.

But you really want to know about Delta's Web site, right? I would, too. I recently received a similar complaint from a reader about a glitch on Delta's dot-com storefront. He said that the airline knew about the problem but refused to fix it. Delta's "Customer Commitment," a 12-step plan adopted on December 15, 1999, makes no mention of any specific warranties given to travelers who book on its Web site.

In the airline's defense, it does offer an online tutorial on how to buy a ticket from its Web site, along with the following disclaimer: "Delta representatives are not trained to help you with technical questions concerning the Internet, Web browsers or how to navigate through the Delta Web site reservations process. If you have a technical question, please e-mail it to Delta. Remember to include your browser type and version, operating system, and description of any error messages you receive. This information may help us to understand your problem."

Never mind the irony of offering a tutorial on how to use a Web site from the airline's own Web site. Or that by the time your problem is fixed (and that's a big "if") the fare you were looking for might be long gone. And forget for the moment the inclusive language that seems to release the airline from any liability.

Instead, let's focus on what your rights were and what you could have done to prevent this from happening.

Like every other airline, Delta is trying to cut its distribution costs by moving more of its bookings to the Web. However, at the same time, it does not regard an Internet reservation as being equal to a phone reservation or even one made through a travel agent. (Delta isn't alone in this; I've had reports of other carriers, notably United, ignoring its Web reservations in a similar way.)

The airline will ignore your e-mails and printouts if it's convenient - and you really have nothing to fall back on. Delta's contract of carriage, which is its agreement between the airline and passenger, makes no mention of online reservations. The government's code of federal regulations doesn't address online purchases of this kind either. Consumer laws regarding Internet buying vary from state to state.

Solution? Don't believe anything on an airline's Web site until you have secured either: a) a record locator, which is a six-digit alphanumeric code unique to every airline ticket; b) a written confirmation from your airline or travel agency, as either a paper ticket or a e-ticket itinerary; or c) proof from your credit card that your purchases went through.

Airlines like Delta apparently think the Web is a cool toy with which they can play around with their customers and never get caught.

Don't become an airline's plaything.

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.