Stop Stealing Our Money

My partner, Heather, recently booked a trip for us from Lisbon, Portugal, where we live, to New York for mid-March. She bought her own ticket via miles on United, a partner of Tap Portugal, and tickets for me and our nearly six-year old daughter through the booking site, Orbitz. She did this on November 27, 2017.

Sometime in December, still three months before the trip, she looked at the reservation and realized she had made an error. While she correctly booked her flight from Wednesday to Sunday, she had accidentally put us on the Thursday flight.

She called Orbitz and told them what happened, hoping not to have to pay the usual draconian $150 change fee per flight, but they told her that wasn’t even an option. The flight was neither changeable nor refundable per TAP Portugal’s terms, and we would have to contact TAP if we wanted to modify the reservation. So she called TAP who told her she had to contact Orbitz because we had booked through them. (I’m not detailing the hold times, the requests for supervisors, etc. we went through a couple times with each company.) Essentially, Orbitz pawned us off on TAP, and TAP pawned us back off on Orbitz.

Apparently, the penalty for Heather clicking on the wrong window (she had opened up multiple browser windows to explore/price different possible itineraries) was either $1,000 (the cost of the two tickets) or our trip being squeezed to the point where we’d barely have any time to see family and friends, and we’d all have even less time to get over our jet-lag after a seven-hour flight, spanning five time zones.

I get that airlines (and booking sites) need to fill flights, and, to that end, it’s reasonable to incentivize passengers to commit to them. If a passenger wants to change his itinerary a week before the flight, that seat might have to be marked down significantly or go unsold. That costs the airline money, and accordingly it has a legitimate business purpose in reducing fares for early bookings and having penalties for late changes. But, as I said, when Heather discovered the error, the flight was still three months away, and in fact the one to which we wanted to switch was still cheaper, i.e., the airline was more concerned about selling seats on that flight than the one we had accidentally booked.

So there was no legitimate business purpose (filling seats) achieved by their policy in this instance. A policy designed to keep planes full would increase penalties in proportion to the flight’s proximity. For bookings far enough out there should be no penalty, or perhaps a very slight one for taking up the time of the agent (though this could easily be automated online.) That the penalty is not merely the draconian $150 change fee per ticket, but the full $1,000 cost of the flights tells me Orbitz and TAP are content to make accidental bookings an ancillary source of profit, above and beyond their core business of booking/transporting people.

This phenomenon is not isolated to the airline industry, of course. Bank of America just announced it will charge low-income customers $12 per month for checking accounts. Do the math:

This isn’t making a legitimate profit on providing banking services, it’s theft. Apparently, corporations from healthcare to banking to airlines have decided to craft policies that extract extra money from customers in amounts wholly out of proportion to the service provided or error made. Yes, Heather made a mistake, and it’s on the customer (more on this below) to use care before booking online, but penalties for such a mistake should reflect what it costs the business — they should not be a separate revenue stream.

So Orbitz and TAP’s policies for changing flights three months out are massively out of proportion to any cost they might incur, but without apparent shame they argued that no matter how unjust and disproportionate such a penalty is, we implicitly agreed to it by booking as the policy was disclosed on the site.

Let’s take a look at where this policy is disclosed:

Here’s what it looks like on Orbitz when you book a flight from Lisbon to NY:

Do you see where it says “non-changeable, non-refundable?” Neither do I. The only indication is “Free cancellation within 24 hours of booking!” I’d take that to mean cancellation is possible after 24 hours, just not for free. It certainly does not mean “Cancellation is impossible without losing the full fare after 24 hours” which is the actual policy were they being upfront.

After you select that itinerary, here’s the next screen:

Do you see any reference to the no-change policy? I don’t either. I only see a credit card offer to tune out. But you can scroll down as you fill out the information.

I see a bad deal for trip insurance, another thing to tune out, but still no mention of the policy. I scroll further:

There’s an offer to join Orbitz Rewards, which I tune out, another mention of free cancellation within 24 hours (not “no cancellation after 24 hours) and a big red button saying “Complete Booking.” Then it says (not that I’m reading all the fine print as I book):

“We understand that sometimes plans change. We do not charge a cancel or change fee. When the airline charges such fees in accordance with its own policies, the cost will be passed on to you.”

Again, this implies there might be no change fees — that it depends on the airline.

Then one line down, and in the same-size font, albeit in bold, “Tickets are non-refundable and nontransferable. Name changes are not allowed.”

There it is, the disclosure of which we’re supposed to be aware before booking! But what does this disclose? That the ticket isn’t refundable. But we weren’t asking for a refund, just a change to another flight and a willingness to pay the difference in costs.

It doesn’t mention anything about TAP not being willing to change it because we booked through Orbitz. So not only was the penalty for our error massively out of proportion to its costs, but the policy mandating massively unjust penalties was not — as alleged — even disclosed to us before booking.

The question then is what makes Orbitz think they can get away with this? Put differently, I run a small online subscription-based fantasy sports business, and our customers occasionally mis-click and, for example, buy the same subscription twice on our site. Not only would we usually catch such an error and refund them automatically, but if we did not, and they brought it to our attention, they would be refunded, no questions asked, even if they didn’t notice until months later. Their error of mis-clicking cost us nothing, and we’re in the business of providing player information, not mis-click revenue extraction. We want the human beings for whom we provide services to be satisfied with our product and happy they chose to use us. Moreover, we’re not idiots — we know we’d be out of business in short order if we crafted policies that made it impossible to refund mis-clicks while purporting to but not quite disclosing that in fine print.

I suspect Orbitz gets away with its egregious policies of customer mistreatment because it’s the only game in town. If you check, Orbitz is owned by Expedia, the same conglomerate that owns: Hotels.com, Travelocity, Hotwire and many other online booking services. If you despise Orbitz, there’s a good chance you’ll end up on one of their other properties. Moreover, as this kind of customer treatment has become more common across other industries, people have become numb to it. We curse our high healthcare premiums and exorbitant deductibles, but pay them because there seems to be no other choice. It’s “policy” we’re told.

The word “policy” is not a justification for unfair treatment. It’s actually the opposite, a re-affirmation of such treatment, but couched in a veneer of inevitability so we don’t even bother to fight back. One learns to put effort toward what one can change and to accept that which is inevitable. Instead of fighting the battle over what’s fair and proportional, a battle they would lose, these companies have cleverly shifted the ground of what’s possible in an attempt to avoid the battle altogether.

But “policy” will not suffice in this case. The policy is wrong, and as such I do not accept it as valid. I want my money back so I can book the correct flight and have the trip that makes sense for my family. I will not accept a $1,000 penalty for a mis-click, and I do not accept your half-assed disclosure of the unjust policy as constituting our consent to it (Would it kill them to put a pop-up that warns potential customers about TAP’s inflexible policy before confirming the booking?)

I have availed myself of all the usual avenues of redress, contacting both Orbitz and TAP as well as Chase, whose credit card Heather used to pay the fare, and none have offered any kind of remedy. So I’m taking matters into my own hands.

My aim here is three-fold (1) to recoup the money Orbitz is stealing from me; (2) to make an example of a bad corporate actor; and (3) to influence others not to accept mistreatment. Someone in management decided an unfair policy would increase revenue, and my goal is to disprove that proposition by making it as costly as possible. Not only will it cost them customers, but it will cost them time and effort. When it’s not just me excoriating them on Twitter, on my SXM show, on the Podcast and calling to urge their customer service reps to do the right thing, but even five or 10 percent of their mistreated customers, they will see their policy for the mistake that it is, and they will reverse it. This process of reversal will occur across every industry and company upon which sufficient pressure is brought to bear. It’s time to bring it.

Post Script: Two and a half days after I wrote this piece and posted it on Twitter where it got some helpful attention from people who believed in the cause, Orbitz refunded me the money in full. They didn’t cop to anything — even alleged that disclosure via fine-print hyperlink was sufficient — and implied they were doing this as a one-time “courtesy” because I was unhappy, i.e., because I was raising too much of a fuss. But in the end, it doesn’t matter what story they told themselves. I got my money back, and the pressure obviously worked. They lost business from the negative publicity and still had to issue a refund. Their unfair policy was a loser in this case, and if enough people follow suit, Orbitz will have no choice but to scrap it.