Cheap Tickets

     Many months ago, my husband and I reserved a mid-March condo week in Hawaii so I have been checking airfares periodically, despite knowing most of the good deals are published 6 to 8 weeks before you fly. As we approached the six week window and the airfares were still in the $800 - $900 range, instead of the $600 - $700 I was hoping for, I was getting desperate. Most of the decent airfares involved leaving from Missoula and spending a night in an airport one or both ways. I was looking for the least inconvenient way to do this when a Cheap Tickets' pop up showed a $700 fare from Kalispell to Lihue. Since four of the five travelers live in Kalispell, not Missoula, this was exciting.
     But I became skeptical of good airfares in December when I was trying to book a flight to Oakland through CheapOair and another similar sounding website. After filling out the traveler and payment info, the promised $450 tickets turned out to be twice that much. If they thought I would pay double just because I had spent so much time inputting data, they obviously don't understand cheapskates. So I was zipping through the passenger and payment information on the Cheap Tickets website with little hope of actually booking them. That is why I didn't notice my typo in Reed's last name, which I should know how to spell because it has been the same as mine for 38 1/2 years. I had booked a ticket for Reed Kamb. In the days of customer service by humans, this would have been easy to correct, but on a multi-airline website, not so much.
     Like most websites, Cheap Tickets customer service consists of printed answers to FAQs, frequently asked questions. The answer for misspelled names was to send an e-mail attaching Reed's passport. I scanned it into our desktop, but it disappeared from there. I couldn't find a way to attach it to the e-mail. Strike one. Unlike many travel websites, this one allowed free cancellation within 32 hours, however, if I sent them an e-mail about correcting the misspelling, they had 48 hours to respond. Strike two. Also like most websites, the customer service phone number was carefully hidden, but I managed to find it. I set my cell to speakerphone and prepared for a long siege. Eventually my call was answered by "Shasta" who was patient, helpful, and really slow. While she cancelled Mr. Kamb's reservation, I was online booking one for Mr. Lamb. This required some coordination because, in order to have Reed sit with the rest of us, Shasta reassigned the other seats while I selected his. I would gladly have paid extra for her to do this for me, but they were not allowed to book at that location. The website said there were only two cheap tickets left, so I would have preferred Shasta's speed over her patience, but that didn't matter because Visa kept declining my transaction. Apparently Visa flagged my rebooking attempts as fraud. Strike three.
     So, in case I hadn't had enough phone time, I got to spend a little more calling the phone numbers on the back of my Visa card. Admittedly, it was my mistake that I called the Marriott Rewards number instead of Chase Bank, so the time I wasted navigating their voice recognition phone tree saying "representative!" was all my fault. At the end of the Chase phone tree, I found one of those nice young men from India, who have American names. "Jeremy" agreed to approve the transaction so I could buy that last cheap ticket. A one letter typo cost me three hours of my life. I managed to accomplish all this without losing my sanity or most of my sanctification, but I did require chocolate to recover. Lots and lots of chocolate.