Beware Expedia.com

This post is a special shout-out to Expedia. Or, rather, it is my attempt to broadcast to as wide of an audience as possible my discontent with Expedia.

I recently booked tickets for a family vacation to Hawaii some months from now. Shortly thereafter, I received an email from Expedia telling me that due to an error, I had been sent two sets of tickets, and would I please send one back. Don't worry, though, they assured me, I had not been charged twice for the tickets.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened my credit card statement to find I had in fact been charged twice for the tickets. I called Expedia to ask that the charge be reversed, and after a lengthy wait, they told me that I needed to mail back the duplicate tickets first. Now, as an attorney, I know that this is illegal, but I agreed to send the tickets back.

Two weeks later, I still had not been credited, so I called Expedia again. After waiting for over thirty minutes, I was told that I should call the airline and ask them for a refund. They followed up with this snippity email:

We have been notified from our billing department that the tickets you sent to us were voided, that means that the amount you were charged for those tickets will automatically get back to you, most of the time for voided tickets, there is a hold on the money back then it is released after 72 hours, meaning you will not see on your statement that there is a refund.
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> Besides that there is no control over voided tickets from expedia but from the airline( validating carrier ATA IBNQZE, res 800 225-2995), and if the charges are still on your statement the only one who has control when to refund that is the airline and they can provide more info about it.
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> Thank you for your patience and choosing expedia.

In other words, they would do nothing for me. I wrote back a very snippety email of my own.

Then, a few days later, I got an email stating that the carrier for the international leg of our flight, ATA, had declared bankruptcy, that they could do nothing for me, and that I should file a dispute with my credit card company. To their credit, pun unintended, my credit card company has been easy to deal with and will be giving me a refund of both sets of tickets, but Expedia has been so utterly unhelpful through several emails and phone calls that I am following through on my threat to never use them again and to advise everyone I know of my experience with Expedia. There are simply too many travel services offering similar pricing for me to use one that treats its customers so poorly.