Last night I went online to book a flight for our upcoming summer destination.
What should’ve been around 10 minutes online at Virgin America ended up being a couple of hours, lots of hold times (with bad music) during calls to customer service and no resolution so far.
I needed three tickets for Kim, Lucas and I (Theo flies as a lap baby). I tried booking a one-way from NYC-LAX on Virgin America for 11,819 points each. The site was working really slowly which surprised me.
After entering our information a couple of times, I thought I had our ticket booked. The site kept loading until it said something like please call customer service. Yikes!
I logged back into my Virgin America account and noticed my Elevate account balance stayed the same but further down the screen it showed 5 increments of 11,819 had been deducted for bookings. I checked my account activity and it turned out that it appeared 6 flights had been booked!
I had no flight confirmation e-mail and no upcoming flights showing in my account.
I decided to call Virgin America and was on hold for over 20 minutes before speaking to a rep. The rep seemed tired. You could tell there were issues and the phones must’ve been ringing like crazy. After she tried to help but couldn’t, I was transferred to another department.
The next rep revealed that the site was down. I explained my situation and he apologized. He then checked and saw how points were deducted from my account (double what I had tried to book) but not flight was booked for us.
He asked me to send an e-mail to customer service explaining the situation. I was also told to call back in around an hour and ask for him.
In the meantime, I noticed at the top of the Virgin America site a Travel Advisory of a Sabre Reservation Outage. That definitely didn’t sound good!
I tried calling back to speak to the same rep but after another hold of around 35 minutes, it turned out that he had already left for the night.
The next rep said that she’d try to help…
After another 10-12 minutes, the points were back in my account. She then said to save me the headache, she’d try to book the flight for us.
She tried to book the flight and kept getting errors so I thought it was time to call it a night.
I mentioned how I had e-mailed customer service like the previous rep had asked with all of the details. I was then told that it wouldn’t be a problem and that the price I had found today would be honored tomorrow even if it goes up. (The rep said an e-mail was sent out to the team.)
I guess I’ll see how that goes after work tomorrow!
