At 3:00am this last Monday morning my wife received a call from her family in England. It was one of those dreaded bad news phone calls. Somebody phoning the U.S. from England at that ungodly hour is not usually looking to talk about the weather or their latest vacation.

Just a few hours before the call, my wife’s father died in England.

After the shock subsided for my wife, she set about making travel plans to get back for the funeral. Now getting an inexpensive flight to England in only a few days notice is one almighty challenge.

But just listen and learn from the events that happened in the next 24 hours.

First off, I should say that getting back to England was not contingent on finding a cheap fare. The important focus was getting there at any cost… and quickly.

And so my wife started her search for a flight that same afternoon.

First dibs around the travel portals of Orbitz and Travelocity turned up flights in the $1,500 range. My wife had those in her back pocket if all else failed, but she kept digging.

By early evening she had stumbled upon qixo.com who offer a flight travel search engine – kind of like Google for travel flights.

Within a few minutes of starting her search through Qixo she hit upon a flight plan that took her from Providence to Washington D.C. and then onto London.

And the ticket price was a good deal at $590. It wasn’t direct but you do get great deals when you’re willing to do a stop and change planes. Well, my wife continued to dig, and found another flight plan from Providence to NY, and then NY to London, with a two-hour stop over in NY. And this price was $492!

At that point booking a flight and the need to get plans squared away drove her to push forward and take the NY flight connection.

Within minutes she got her confirmation back and her final itinerary plans. To her horror she saw for the first time what this flight was all about. Yes, she left Providence and arrived at NY La Guardia, but then left for London Heathrow from NY J.F.K. airport.

This was the first time she knew that in NY the arrival and departure flights were in different airports. And I don’t know about you but getting from La Guardia to JFK in two hours just doesn’t happen in a normal NY traffic day. Bottom line – it can’t be done!

And we’re talking about picking up baggage and making an international flight with getting through the security in place now. Well, you get the stressful and aggravating picture by now.

My wife felt a little duped.

And when my wife feels duped she goes on the warpath. Now listen closely to what happens next…

She contacted Qixo via the Internet chat feature and they told her that the booking was made through airfare.com and she would have to speak directly to them.

This is because these cheap tickets carry a price… and the price is a heavy surcharge if you want to switch afterwards. I talk about this in issue #1 of my eZine which each month covers all these little gottchas on travel and vacation tips. You can subscribe to New England vacations newsletter by clicking here .

So my wife called airfare.com and began to explain what happened and was told you’ll have to pay a $100 surcharge to switch the flight to the Washington DC flight. This was not the right answer for my wife!

She pushed back and told the rep. there was no indication on the booking page that NY wasn’t the same NY airport on both flights, and wasn’t that cause for bad customer service.

Well you know how it is… despite companies saying customer service is #1 and our employees are empowered to make a bad situation right for a customer… it really comes with a large disclaimer, which is…. providing you get the right agent on the phone.

But my wife is an experienced traveler and knows this so she asked to talk with the supervisor. She was told to call back in one hour when the supervisor would be available.

Enter into the ring – voicemail!

For the next few hours my wife was stuck in the voicemail endless loop. But this one had a twist. You see she couldn’t leave a message on the supervisor’s phone. She kept being prompted to leave a message and then told… “Insufficient memory to record a message – goodbye.”

So she kept phoning and… well… NOT leaving messages… and all the time the clock was ticking and that seat on the Washington DC plane was in danger of being snapped up by somebody else.

After six call backs my wife eventually got to speak on the phone with the real live supervisor and not a piece of technology.

For the nth time she explained the problem and the as soon as the supervisor brought my wife’s itinerary up on her screen and saw the problem for herself she said… “There’s no way you can do that…. There’s not enough time for you to make the connection… let me change it for you now. Which flight did you want to change it to?”

What an absolute relief it is when you find somebody that understands your problem and wants to help you.

In the end my wife had to pay an extra $30, but given this was a fraction of the difference between the two flights anyway she didn’t argue about it.

So a couple of take-aways for us on this are:

1. Don’t give up finding the right person to help you.
2. Make sure when using these internet travel portal services and you’ve a connection - you know exactly what that connection looks like BEFORE booking. If they can’t or won’t tell you go somewhere else.
3. Be careful where you book your cheap flights online. For more information on this topic see this post on another Blog by clicking here.

The next problem my wife encountered was with her credit card, but I’ll save that for another post in a few days time, and I’ll tell you what you can do to avoid calls from the fraud squad.

You can find a lot of travel information at my New England vacations guide by clicking here .

Cliff Caldewood