Airline Drama

Vayama.com (specialty: cheap, international, multi-leg airplane reservations. NOT their specialty: customer service) has an etiquette section of their website based on what is and isn't acceptable in different cultures. It's not as complete as the Canadian one I mentioned in a past post, but their section on Poland does hit the major questions.

I've only heard good things about Vayama. Which is why I surprised by my customer service disaster. I went online to check-in for my flight to LA. While I was online, I thought that I might as well verify my flight to Poland and see if I could get better seats. Alas, I wasn't able to access my reservation because there'd been a change to it. Who knows when this change happened because Vayama never notified me about it. So, I called customer service three times, leaving a message each time. When they finally called me back, it was a woman with a very heavy accent telling me that I needed to reconfirm my flights because two of the flight numbers had changed. So I reconfirmed, and she sent me a confirmation e-mail.

On the confirmation e-mail, I discovered that not only had those two flight numbers changed, but another flight number had changed, a flight time had changed (which is slightly more important), and my e-ticket number on LOT had changed - probably the most significant change, in my opinion. So, I went onto LOT airlines to see if I could finally confirm my seats. The same LOT website I couldn't access with my old e-ticket number, which was making me think for quite a few scary hours that they'd just canceled my flights and not notified me. On the LOT website, I found out that the seats I had selected when booking my flight were lost since I hadn't reconfirmed the changes to my itinerary in time - the changes that no one notified me about. So, I picked a (new and) terrible (aisle) seat, hoping that the people near the window - the best place for a nine hour sleeping flight - weren't going to want to get in and out all the time.

That, wasn't what I considered terrible customer service until I returned from California and went to check my twitter. During this process, I had tweeted my frustrations:

Evidently @vayama changed my reservation. Didn't e-mail or notify me in any way about it. Now @vayama isn't answering my calls.

At least I went on-line to see if I could change my seats today and found out even if @vayama didn't want to notify me itself.

I had to reconfirm my flights because the flight number changed. Seems a bit excessive. I'm sure @vayama has a reason? Glad it's fixed.

Oh, And they only told me about the changes to two of my flights... not to the third...

But what was worse than my tweets were the response from their "customer service."

VayamaVoice: @omahairish the AIRLINE changed your flight not vayama. Glad it's fixed now.

VayamaVoice: @omahairish you can always view the CURRENT status of your itinerary by going to www.vayama.com/mytrip

Seriously, Vayama? I KNOW who changed my flight. The issue is that I was never notified by the people who should have notified me. Also, even now, I can't view the CURRENT status of my itinerary because of this. I replied to him. I know I should just drop it, but I've never heard of customer service types being that incredibly rude.

What's sketchy about this customer service twitter feed is that it's separate from their official twitter. I thought their official twitter was @vayama. This is @vayamavoice. He's only been operating since May 6, but hardly has any tweets. Also, he only has three followers. All of this points to : NOT REAL. Sorry if I'm not going to send you the info you need to get into my account.

All this points to, I'll avoid using Vayama again. Which is too bad, because they're super cheap and useful as far as websites go.

Oh, and you should check out their Polish Etiquette page.