Airfare.com

Online since 1996, Airfare.com offers cheap flights and cheap hotels reservations. Airfare.com offers specially negotiated, deeply discounted airline tickets up to 70% off.

Consumer Complaints Reviews

This is a long and involved story but suffice to say, Airfare.com have swindled me out of roughly $3800 over the last 18 months. I booked a flight from New Orleans to Australia about 18 months ago and found I was unable to fly about 2 weeks before my flight was due to depart. After lengthy negotiations with Airfare.com and the airlines I was supposed to fly with (who were helpful but unable to do anything since the booking was through a third party), I was able to keep my credit and change my flights, at great expense of course (I think the fee to change my booking was somewhere in the order of $800). While this was prohibitively expensive, since the original flight was also pricey (several thousand dollars), it seemed worthwhile.

Cut to a few weeks ago, when I found out through my lawyer that I would be unable to fly due to my current visa status. Essentially, leaving the United States at this time could result in me being disallowed to re-enter the country, so in her own words "it's not worth the risk". I try to do the right thing and contact Airfare.com to let them know I need to cancel, not really expecting to get any credit back. More than anything, I was trying to do right by this company and the airline. It's a pain when passengers no-show. So I call the number of the Airfare.com website. The first THREE times I call, I'm put through to a customer service rep who, after saying 'hello', doesn't speak to me at all. I don't know if the call dropped (it was still connected?) or whether they just didn't feel like working. But either way, by the fourth time I called, I was pretty annoyed.

I tried to explain the situation to the customer service rep who seemed more interested in talking over the top of me. He told me in no uncertain terms that I could NOT get any credit back on the flight and when I asked to speak to a supervisor, he initially refused. It wasn't until I told him very calmly and firmly that I knew I was entitled to speak to a supervisor that he finally put me on hold and transferred me. By the time the supervisor got on the line, I had decided that there was no reason for me to speak to another rude, helpful person in a call center on the other side of the world. Previous reviewers are right, it's near impossible to speak to a fluent English speaker who works for this company. When I asked the supervisor if I could be transferred to someone in an office in the United States, she simply said "No". About 5 times.

Finally, she told me to just email. At this point, I was so annoyed that I agreed. Not only was the connection bad/muffled but nobody spoke anything better than broken English. And they seemed more interested in reciting a script than listening to what I was actually asking them. Email seemed preferable. Upon emailing Airfare.com, I was told that I would have to pay A CANCELLATION FEE. I didn't get around to finding out how much the fee was because at this point, I firmly emailed them back and told them "Haha, no way. I'll just no-show if that's the case." They then proceeded to call ME about 6 times even though each time, I told them very firmly that I was not going to pay to cancel my flight and that I would appreciate if they stopped calling me.

Finally, I called Delta and Virgin to find out if I could do anything on their end. Guess what? They had NO RECORD of my booking. I am not currently listed in their system (as of today, November 9 2015), despite the fact that I am supposed to fly out of the United States on a Delta/Virgin flight on November 30th. In the words of the Delta rep, "your third party hasn't paid us for the flights yet". Even though I booked over 18 months ago. Right. In short, AVOID. This company says they are based in Washington, they are not. They are based in India. It's impossible to speak with someone who is fluent in English. They will give you the runaround and charge you excess fees whenever they can. And it seems like even if I had turned up to the airport and tried to board my flight on the 30th, there's a good chance the airline would have had no record of me as a passenger! Not worth it. I wish Kayak would stop using them as a suggested third party.