I keep finding out how evil Expedia really is. They keep finding ways to lie, spin stories, and do everything they can to refuse to give us a refund. They won't admit to mistakes. They keep blaming the airline and even the bank.
Before I tell you how this story has evolved, here are some horror stories from other people about Expedia:
http://www.geoffdominy.com/expedia_travel.htm - A musician that had Expedia let him down three times
http://www.marketingshift.com/2005/12/expedia-dot-scam.cfm - Lots of tossing back and forth between people who have had money stolen by Expedia, and a few people from Expedia, possibly, that come in and call everyone whiners.
Another interesting thing is Wikipedia. According to Wikiscanner, which is a software "watcher" which checks when and where edits are made to Wikipedia, 261 edits have been done for Expedia.com. Many of there involve information about dirty tactics, and were removed or heavily edited from Bellevue, Washington, or more precisely, from Expedia's headquarters. Check it out:
http://katrina.cs.caltech.edu/erenrich_rnd345/scanner_final/company_selection.php?company_name=expedia That means that someone from Expedia actually went to Wikipedia and erased the bad stuff. You know, the truth.
So after spending more countless hours through the month of August including today, Expedia still won't offer a refund. Delta states that they will give us a $358 credit to fly with them, minus a $150 fee. So that makes it $208. That's not good enough, because we have to use the tickets before May, and that still doesn't cover the amount we lost. So we asked for a supervisor through Expedia (since Delta really didn't want to deal with us anymore) and Expedia suddenly offered us a $200 credit after we mentioned we wanted contact information from the corporate office. But there's a catch: We can only use it after we spend money. So combining it with the Delta tickets, we would still have to wind up paying more money, use it within the next 8 months, and then cross our fingers and hope that Expedia actually refunds the money. Fool me once...
But wait, there's more! Expedia now claims that we actually did buy additional tickets through a second account, something completely new to us. Apparently, Tina had signed into a 'Guest' account, entered her information, and bought two more tickets. Of course, Tina was completely unaware of this, while Expedia was apparently fully aware and decided not to tell us. My opinion? After all this trouble, Expedia went in and actually created the account, then updated their computer's information to cover up the mistake. That's a very likely scenario, because not one of the customer support techs could ever see that information, and neither could we until today.
So from the top, here are Expedia's errors: Not cancelling the tickets. Incorrectly telling us that the 2nd pair of tickets were cheaper, they weren't. Not informing us that we had purchased 2 different tickets from one day to the next until it mysteriously popped up in the end. And another new one: incorrectly labeling our daughter's age, turning a baby into a child. Tina went into the information she had originally typed in and it clearly stated the children's correct birth dates. The error was created by Expedia.
Except for the mysterious post at The Consumerist, at no time did Expedia apologize or admit the above errors. What's next? A big corporate email bomb, and we will be emailing the story to over 400 media news sites, radio stations and papers including US, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, France, & Australia. Plus, we are hitting local papers, schools, community events, cork-boards at the supermarket, Facebook, T-shirts, car advertisements, you name it. All saying what Expedia is really like. If I can get just one travel-loving person to not use Expedia after seeing all of this, they would have lost more money then if they just gave me the refund. But I bet it will be more then one person...
Stay classy, Expedia.
