Expedia saved the trip

I booked a flight and hotel package with Expedia for April 19-26, 2007. I did this several months before departure and opted to include the Expedia Package Protection plan, which was good because I had to use it only three hours before my flight for a very unexpected reason.

I live on the 24th floor of a highrise condominium. A week or so before my trip, we were warned that there would be an elevator shutdown for a few hours on the day of my flight. I finished some last-minute shopping and returned just before the elevators were restarted, still with plenty of time to make my flight.

I finished packing, checked the apartment, called a cab and headed for the elevator to start my trip to the airport. Lo and behold, when I pushed the “down” button, nothing happened. I checked with security and was told that the elevators had been shut down and would not be restarted until an hour before my flight. Clearly, it was necessary to do some last-minute high-speed rescheduling.

I called Expedia and was temporarily derailed when their computer told the customer service representative that the flight had already left (this was three hours before departure) and that I would have to talk to British Airways. British Air, in turn, told me that I had to talk to Expedia because the flight had not left yet.

When I got back to Expedia, the representative found out that the computer lists flights as “departed” 12 hours before actual departure (don’t ask me why), but he was able to get around this glitch. He then patiently spent almost an hour with me on the phone changing flights and the hotel reservation and arranging for an instant refund of my original payments.

With good humor but with difficulty reading the German hotel names, he described the alternate hotels, particularly their locations with respect to the parts of Zürich I was visiting. There was a 100-dollar change fee that was refunded by an insurance company. I had prepaid tickets to three concerts in Zürich and was able to attend the events on schedule.

With a travel agency like Expedia that transacts almost all of its business online, I expected that I would have to deal with an unresponsive, uninformed customer service representative reading his answers from a textbook. It is not possible to describe how pleased I was to find that I was wrong!

RONALD S. RATNEY

Boston, MA