I am writing this review not because it is my habit to be writing reviews in general, nor because I am going to particularly enjoy writing such a thing, but simply because I had a so outrageously exasperating customer experience with the mentioned companies that I feel obliged to let it in public and maybe help some people to avoid experiencing similar issues.
I had used momondo.com once again in the past to book my flight tickets. The particulars of that past experience will not be the subject of the present review, but it was also a highly bitter one, so that I was then resolved to never again use that site’s services. Several months later, while in the process to book a trip, I chanced to see an ad from momondo advertising my upcoming trip in a considerably lower fare than anyone else’s. Despite my past experience and intuition urging me to not, I decided to give them a second chance. But I was terribly wrong doing that…
I click on my preferred flight-plan and they instantly take me over to a German booking site: tripado.de, which had absolutely zero information in English.
With what a logic does an international, English-language booking site transfer me to a site I might not be understanding at all to book my flight…?
Anyway, utilizing my poor German skills, striving with the general dysfunctionality of the site, and tolerating a few instances it totally crashed, I after all managed to complete my booking.
I then received almost instantly a sketchy confirmation mail, bearing no ticket, but only the plane schedule and some other irrelevant bullshit. Gmail had also adorned that mail with a red question mark, which upon hover over it let me know that: “Gmail could not verify that tripado.de actually sent this mail (and not a spammer).”
“WTF?” thought I. But I let it go as I checked that the payment has been normally processed and I assumed that they are going to send me the ticket some time soon.
Next day, some ten hours after the original booking, I finally received something from them. But it was definitely not what I was expecting. It read as follows:
“die Fluggesellschaft *** hat uns mitgeteilt, dass unter Ihrem Namen zwei identische Buchungen bestehen, mit den Buchungsreferenzen *** und *** .
Alle in unserem Hause eingehenden Buchungen werden unabhängig voneinander durch eine Automation bearbeitet. Daher ist die Erkennung einer Doppelbuchung in unserem System nicht möglich. Für beide Buchungen haben Sie von uns eine Bestätigung erhalten.
Wir haben die Buchung *** für Sie kostenfrei storniert. Auch Ihre Doppelbuchung *** müssen wir leider absagen, da der angeforderte Tarif nicht von der Fluggesellschaft bestätigt wurde.
Den bereits über PayPal bezahlten Rechnungsbetrag werden wir Ihnen schnellstmöglich rücküberweisen.
Wir würden uns freuen Sie bald wieder als Kunde auf unserer Webseite begrüßen zu dürfen.
Gerne stehen wir Ihnen für weitere Fragen zur Verfügung und wünschen Ihnen einen angenehmen Tag.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen”
Which roughly translates as:
“The airline *** has informed us that there are two identical bookings under your name with the booking references *** and ***.
All bookings received in our house are processed independently by automation. Therefore, it is not possible to recognize a double posting in our system. For both bookings you have received a confirmation from us.
We have canceled the booking *** for you free of charge. We also have to cancel your double booking *** as the requested rate has not been confirmed by the airline.
The invoice amount already paid via PayPal will be returned to you as soon as possible.
We would be glad to welcome you again as a customer on our website.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. We wish you a pleasant day.
Best regards”
I suppose you can imagine what a frustration I went through!
What initially exasperated me the most was not the actual cancellation of my booking, but they trying to make it appear as having resulted after my fault.
“We have canceled the booking *** for you free of charge“
Oh really??? You have taken my money promptly… you cancel my booking after half a day… and I should also be grateful you don’t charge me on top of that!!! Come on people! Seriously? Do you carry any brains into your skulls, or thatch instead?
I can think of two possibilities regarding that alleged second booking:
They either 1) mistakenly sent a booking over to the airline, upon one of my tries when their site crashed, without having received any bank information, or 2) they did so on purpose after realizing that the rate offered was no longer available.
The first would be just idiotic…
Come on folks! Since when do booking-sites confirm bookings with airlines without having received any payment first?
The second would be a pitiful act of outrageous knavery, on which I’d rather not comment further as it will likely become highly inappropriate.
Thereafter, exactly as they urged me in their mail, I did not hesitate to contact them at all. Not to much avail however…
Throughout the whole day I sent them three mails, a few facebook messages, and I spent some 5€ and two hours of my day altogether to listen to classical music on their telephone line.
I after all decided to try getting in contact with them by commenting on their facebook ads. They were then – magically – quick to reply, still only with stupid automatic messages however. Only next day, and after persisting a great deal, I finally managed to communicate with a real person. That person was rather up to complain about my behavior, and he didn’t seem to care much about my missing money.
The same story went with Momondo, whom I also tried to contact right away, but gave no sign of some real person existing behind the company before commenting on their ads.
Luckily, I had performed the transaction via Paypal, and with their aid I managed to recover my payment the next day.
I think there is a great chance those people were really trying to boldly scam me out of 500€!!!
And as numerous other negative references found around the internet about them were stating, they have done so before!
But even if it wasn’t exactly so, and they were going to refund me by themselves (without Paypal’s intervention) some time, I would still be no happy to wait for that time.
I have booked a great many of tickets online in my life and this has never happened before!
My conclusion:
I would rather swim across the Atlantic than ever again attempt to book a flight-ticket with them.
