Do Not Use Bookit.com For your Travels: Very Untrustworthy

For my first blog piece about our trip to Orlando I thought I would get the nasty and serious issue out of the way so that then we can focus on all the good stuff after. I'm telling you about this because I don't want this to happen to any other family. We did everything we could to make this trip go smoothly and Bookit.com is just not a company to trust with such an important matter.  Sit down for this good read cause It’s going to be a long one.

We would not have gone on this trip if we had not been emailed such a wonderful sounding deal from bookit.com through Travelzoo.com. The deal was a Disney Resort hotel price of $60.00 a night if booked through bookit.com with a free room upgrade and free breakfast buffet every morning as well as if we bought 3 days worth of park hopper passes (which means we could jump around all 4 Disney parks: Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and Hollywood Studios) then we would get 4 days of park hopper passes for free. We would be literally saving thousands of dollars! We had played with the idea before we found this offer but had decided it would be too costly and this fell into our laps and we just couldn’t turn it down, so we booked on March 31, 2010. We got a confirmation email from bookit.com with an ID number and everything, at first, seemed perfect.

2 weeks before our trip I called bookit.com to add an extra night’s stay at the hotel onto our itinerary. While going through the motions of adding that night, I asked the customer service rep. how we would receive our park hopper passes since our itinerary did not explain this. She said, “you haven’t recieved them in the mail? That’s odd. And you booked back on March 31st?” I said yes and asked what were we suppose to do if we did not recieve them before we left. She then informed me that all I had to do was take our voucher to the resort and show them to a representative and they would give us new passes.

2 days later I called bookit.com again to ask about how we made sure we got the free room upgrade and then proceeded to tell that representative what the first rep. had told us about getting our park hopper passes but I didn’t know where I could find  the “voucher”  I needed to show them at the resort. She then walked me through the website to my itinerary page, which I already had, and told me that all I had to do was show them my itinerary page and that that was my voucher and they would give me the tickets with that documentation.

The DAY we arrived I called bookit.com AGAIN and told the 3rd rep. what I had already been told by to other reps and asked AGAIN if that was right and if I could hold off and start my park hopper passes the following day. She said yes, and that all I needed to do is go to Will Call at any Disney park and they could issue us new passes.

The next day I dressed my 4 year-old daughter in her Cinderella dress and crown that her grandparents had given to her for her birthday for this exact reason (to wear to Disney World) and we setting out to the Magic Kingdom all ready and set for the day WITH our itinerary page. We waited in line at Will Call and then explained to the Disney rep the situation and handed her our itinerary. 30 minutes later she hands it back to me after several phone calls to her supervisor and other employees and informed me that she does not have tickets for us. That bookit.com buys a lotted amount of tickets and that they were responsible for getting them to us. None have been reserved for us through bookit.com. She suggested I go to Guest Relations and see if there is anything they could do for us.

While riding the monorail over to the actual park and guest relations I decided to call bookit.com and advise them on what was going on. After I had fully informed the bookit.com rep of EVERYTHING that had happened up to that point he then tells me, “Well, you were given incorrect information. If we sent you tickets already, we can’t buy or send you new tickets. We can’t just send out multiple tickets out for each customer cause you can’t cancel tickets that have already been sent.” I again told him that I was acting on information given to me by bookit.com’s own representatives. He then put me on hold to find out what he could do to help me. At this point I was standing in line at Guest Relations.

A half hour later he informs me that they have checked with FedEx and the passes, for some reason, were deemed undeliverable to our house and that they were sitting in a FedEx office in my hometown of Rock Springs and that the only thing they could do for me was get the passes sent to our hotel as soon as possible, but seeing as that it was Saturday the earliest we could get our passes were Tuesday morning. I then told him that this was an unacceptable resolution because 3 prior conversations with bookit.com reps had ended in advising me to go to Disney World to fix it and now that I was there, standing outside of the Magic Kingdom with my daughter excited and dressed like Cinderella, I should have resolved this in Rock Springs with a simple phone call to the local FedEx office. If he couldn’t find a way to get us in to the Magic Kingdom that day then he needed to find someone who could.

After telling me he was going to transfer me to his supervisor the line went dead. He then called me back and apologized and transfer me again only to have the line to ring a couple of times and then the phone call was dropped again. At this point I was at a Guest Relations booth and talking to a Disney rep when he called back again, but I did not pick up. As soon as I was done talk to the Disney rep I called back and requested to talk to the supervisor which I was then told she was at lunch. That made me EXTREMELY mad because as me and my family were stranded outside of the Magic Kingdom my issue was not pressing enough to resolve before she went to lunch.

It took multiple phone calls and 4 hours later to finally get the supervisor on the phone who reiterated that there was nothing she could do for me accept get my original passes sent to our hotel and even went as far as telling me that this all started because we entered the wrong address which made them undeliverable. I then informed her that the address was correct, I don’t know why they couldn’t deliver them and that that was all beside the point because I had called twice before coming to find out what I needed to do to get the passes and if at any point they would have done their job and found out the problem when I called I would have had no problems and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

I then informed her that we were not going to wait around in the hotel for three days waiting for the tickets and that any Disney passes we bought during our wait time bookit.com would reimburse us because in no way was this disaster my fault. She then said she could not agree to this and that she could put in a request but in no way guarantee that bookit.com would refund any money.

Now, this is about 30 minutes into our conversation and at no point yet has she apologized for anything. I again tell her this is unacceptable because bookit.com has literally ruined this vacation, it’s been a waste of money and time, which we don’t have either of, and that the only way we could salvage this trip was to double pay for tickets we’ve already bought, not right. Who was going to tell my 4 year-old Cinderella that her mom did everything she could to make this trip a wonderful one but in the end she couldn’t meet Cinderella.

At this point the supervisor started to apologize. Which I thanked her for because at no point had bookit.com even acknowledged that there was any wrong doing on their part and quite frankly I felt ignored and neglected for a good portion of the day when we were having immediate issues. She then said she would do everything on her part to make sure that the reimbursement request would be submitted in our favor and that I should hold on to all our receipts.

At that point there was nothing else she or I could do to immediately resolve the issue. They weren’t going to buys us new tickets and I wasn’t going to waste our trip or disappoint my daughter. We called the next day and received the fax number AND address to send in our receipts for review.

We just got back Saturday night and all of us have been incredibly sick since and just got around to feeling better and faxing in the receipts today. we put on the fax that if they did not respond within 24 hours that we will be reporting them to the Better Business Bureau. I will definitely update you on this matter as it unfolds.