Air Brokers International, Inc.

 

6

6

Nelson R.

San Francisco, CA

I would not recommend booking a tour through Airbrokers unless you're planning on a very exotic locale or have zero time to figure your planes out for yourself. Even then, go to another vendor. Only use Airbrokers as a last resort.

When you drop a couple Gs on a trip you expect decent customer service. Ours was horrible. The agent was supposed to mail my travel companions and my tickets out a couple weeks before our departure date. With four days to go, one travel companion called and she still had not sent them! Then she offered to put the tickets in the mail. We had to go pick up the tickets for fear that a small delay in the mail would ruin our trip. Rather than meet and apologize for her slip-up, she pretended to be on the phone when I went to pick them up and gave the tickets to a secretary so she wouldn't have to talk to me.

The next problem occurred when we got to our first location. It became apparent through a series of rebookings that the agent had no idea what the most cost efficient itinerary was. We rerouted through a city not on the original itinerary, but one that would have been a logical extension of our itinerary. It saved us over a hundred dollars, and we got to see another city. This gave me a severe lack of confidence in the assistance and expert advise we thought we were getting when we went to Airbrokers. The agent had no idea that 8 days in one city could better be spent in two, and for less! Travel agents are supposed to have, in my opinion, this type of information. It's half the reason you go to them. No advice was forthcoming. Better to go to a site like wikitravel or buy a Lonely Planet and do the research on your own (we didn't because we were extremely busy) than rely on Airbrokers' advice or help.

At another point down further into the trip, I made some more alterations to my itinerary. I sought the aid of the agent who was slow to respond, and when she did, she suggested I go to the ticketing offices of the airlines concerned. I did. The people at the ticketing offices, when they heard my request and saw that my original ticket had been booked through a travel agent, said that the agent should be handling everything. When I told them I had talked to my agent, their response was, "Well she's just being lazy. This is the type of thing she should be doing for you. Sorry but we can't help you."--(Imagine that in a British-Hungarian accent.)

Throughout the whole process the agent was difficult to get ahold of, often times requiring a second and a third email before she'd respond. This happened even in the early booking stage. Our trip wasn't anything grand, but I'd expect that three people buying around the world  tickets would receive better service. We got sucked in by what initially seemed to be a cheaper airfare and a good website. Don't let the same thing happen to you. Even if you end up spending a hundred or two hundred dollars more, it'd be worth it not to deal with this company's service.

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