Don’t deal with Expedia w/under 24 hours!
We made a plan reservation last night around midnight for a plane flight today at 12:30PM using Expedia. It looked like everything went fine, in fact I could see the transaction pending using our banks website within 15 seconds. The next morning my wife gets to the airport, and lo and behold they claim that the ticket was never issued, and that the ticket had not been paid. Yet the money was still tied up by the pending transaction as my wife tried to by another ticket only to have it declined due to the “lack of funds” in the account. At first Expedia tried to claim that the flight had been canceled – a total lie! Our bank told us the only way to have the transaction reversed and the funds freed up was to have a fax sent to them from the Expedia telling them to void the transaction. In the meantime, Expedia kept claiming that the charge should automatically reverse itself since the tickets had not been issued. As of this writing, almost 18 hours after the initial charge the has not been reversed!!
It turns out that the reason the ticket was never issued was that it was “purchased” within 24 hours of the flight time. Expedia NEVER made it clear that there might be an issue with the ticket, and they even sent an email confirmation showing the reservation had been made.
Expedia should have made clear in the “confirmation” that there was a possibility of a problem, and they also NEVER should have charged our account for a ticket that had not really been issued. And when this was brought to our attention they should have IMMEDIATELY issued a credit to our (or voided the transaction, whatever they had to do to alert the bank to return the funds to our account).
The moral of the story? Don’t trust the travel sites, especially when making reservations with less than 24 hours. And when paying for tickets, use a credit card, not debit card.