Travelocity.com - unable to book tickets for prices listed on site

# 9 for October 10, 2003

Complaints.com received the following on October 9, 2003:

From:

RE: Travelocity.com - unable to book tickets for prices listed on site

On September 16, 2003 I was searching on www.travelocity.com for airfare around Thanksgiving from GEG to EWR. I would do a specific date, time and passenger number search and would come up with a price of $427 when I would be asked to select an outbound flight. Upon being asked to select a return flight (once again on a specific day) the price would go down, sometimes to $381.

Everytime I would click on the final page, the price for the two tickets would go to $1789. I could go back and search again using all the same criteria and the same thing would happen. An hour on hold with travelocity on 9-16-03 yielded no results and I contacted Ms. Bullock.

I was told the tickets were no longer available at that price repeatedly, even though for days afterwards I could still pull them up and the price was always switched at the end.

Complaints are as follows

1. Travelocity appears to offer tickets at a certain price (bait) and changes the price on the final purchase page (switch). Ms. Bullock seemed to insist I was doing a general search and picking my dates after I found the fair, but in fact the opposite was true. 2. After I complained, the tickets were still available at the $381 days later and still couldn't be purchased, in my experience. Had it been a system error, I would have expected the tickets to be removed. Since travelocity buy tickets from the airlines and brokers them, if they don't have tickets for a certain price, they shouldn't be allowed to advertise them on their website. 3. Ms. Bullock offered me alternative tickets on a different airline, but the tickets I had originally desired were of course still visible on the site. She then told me she could get them for more than the site listed and give me voucher that would bring my cost close to the listed cost but still over by $50 or so. She also told me it was my problem if I didn't like their offer and they were doing nothing wrong.