Continental Airline Tickets

Big problems cancelling Continental Airline refundable ticket through Orbitz?

Knowing plans might change, on Orbitz, I purposely searched for refundable fares (by checking "only show refundable fares" under expanded search options). Additional note, I needed to cancel because they jacked up my father and I's boarding pass names because they said they don't put middle names on boarding passes (we both have the same first/last names). I smelt something fishy was going on when they said we have to put Mr. John Smith on one ticket and John Smith on the other. Now when trying to cancel and get my refund back. Their policy is NOT to deposit the entire amount back into a cc account, but I get my money back as a credit for a future flight. The problem with this is is that in order to fly somewhere else you must pay $250 fee per ticket and additional $30 fee per ticket and any additional airline rate fare increases in the future. So for my dad and I to fly from Houston to Corpus Christi, it will cost me $540 + $560 of fees! Info on their site (and probably most airlines) is very vague and dubious. Orbitz shafts its customers and have no personal care for their customers like Southwest Airlines does! The moral of the story is never book so-called refundable fares through a travel agency, especially in these so-called "financial crisis" times.

Public Comments

1. see it is for reasons like these that one should always buy tickets directly through airline websites. I also have had the same experience earlier when using online travel agencies to book tickets. So now I rather prefer to use "Meta Search" sites like kayak.com or ixigo.com to book airline tickets. the difference with them is that they aggregate information from the airline websites and show you the results from there. and when you chose a particular offering from some airline, they redirect you to that airline website to purchase the ticket directly from them. hence no middleman and no crisis like this !! This reminds me of a similar incident that happened with a friend. He had book a ticket for this paretns through one of the OTAs in india. When they reached the airport to take the flight, to their shock, they discoevered that the particular flight had been rescheduled and had already taken off !! Then they made some frantic calls to the Online Travel Agency they had used and came to know that the agency had not passed on their phone numbers to the airline. And hence the airline officials said it was not their fault. After a lot of running around they could manage to get some 15% of their cash back from the agency. had they booked their ticket directly from the airline website they wouldn't have faced this problem ! Moral of the story: Always book your ticket directly on the airline website after doing a thorough research online. NEVER use OTAs. metasearch sites like www.ixigo.com and kayak.com are the way to go
2. Jerry, why don't you take them to Magistrate Court where you live, and let a magistrate tell them what "refundable" means. Their policy and what the contract (ticket is a contract) says may be two different things. Regards, Dan
3. I work for orbitz, and the thing is that orbitz paid for that ticket so in orfer for them to give u a new fare they have to pay for that one, so why are u canceling? because of the same names? The Mr in font of john smith would be your father they have to do that because putting 2 john smiths in one PNR is going to cause the airline to cancel the rez because of a dupe name. What you can do is call continental and talk to some for a refund, that might be possible through them, but you will always have to pay some sort of a fee, this is to prevent people from reserving space on a flight and not using it, which they could of sold to someone else. The rules suck, but if there were no fees orbitz would lose alot of money, orbitz buys these flights and sells them to customers, so when u buy it and if u get ur money back orbitz doesnt get theirs and they cant sell that ticket again since it was once a confirmed reservation. Good Luck im in the refund dept. so i might just get yo speak to you :D