Unsure if I have flights booked or not!

[rogdmum]

I’m in a bit of a crazy travel situation. We’d booked flights to Orlando for this summer with Lastminute.com. These were cancelled by the airline last week so we’re going through the refund process. Last minute.com didn’t have a suitable alternative at a reasonable price but I found (actually better though a bit more expensive) flights on Opodo with Aer Lingus.

I received flight confirmation direct from Aer Lingus the next morning and was able to go into my bookings and select seats for the outward journey- ie everything looked fine. A few hours later, I received an email from Opodo saying they had been unable to process my booking and so it was cancelled but not to worry as no money had been taken from my bank/card.

I phoned Opodo who were actually good at trying to help. They tried to speak to Aer Lingus to find out if I did have a booking, but Aer Lingus wouldn’t speak to them and said I needed to phone.

So I phoned Aer Lingus who said everything was fine and I did have flights booked.

At this point, the transaction was showing as pending on my credit card.

Yesterday, I checked my credit card and the transaction has completely disappeared. There is no charge for the flights showing at all. Not pending. Not completed. It’s just not there.

I can still see my booking on the Aer Lingus website and Aer Lingus are unable to tell me if it has been paid, but say the flights are booked.

Now I’m worried that Aer Lingus will realise I haven’t paid for the flights and they will be cancelled on me at some point in the next couple of months! I couldn’t get Aer Lingus to understand this concern as they just kept saying my booking looked fine at their end.

Now what? Does anyone know if there is a way for me to escalate this within Aer Lingus to make sure the flights are paid and the booking is not cancelled?

Glad you got sorted finally OP! Enjoy your holiday 😊

Well it turns out it wasn’t quite sorted!

Unbelievably (and not spotted by me), Opodo reversed the payment I made to them on 12 May! However, the next day, Aer Lingus emailed me to say their sales team would contact Opodo again and tell them to sort it. This resulted in a random phone call from Opodo telling me I needed to pay for the booking. At this point. At this point I didn’t realise Opodo had reversed the previous week’s payment so I got cross, checked my credit card balance, saw that the reversal had been put through, got cross again and then paid.

I’ll keep a close eye on it between now and July.

I skipped the hassle of paying on 12 May as well. I was doing it over the phone and the Opodo agent told me my card had been declined. She then sent me an email link to pay but it was declined as well. So I went onto the chat line for my credit card provider and they told me the payment had been flagged as fraudulent and I needed to phone the fraud line.

I didn’t want to disconnect from Opodo as it had taken me 40 minutes to get through to them so I went upstairs to steal my daughter’s phone to phone the cc company. They shed me for my cc number so I went back downstairs to find it and couldn’t find the card anywhere. So I had to hang up on both the cc company and Opodo while I looked for my card.

Which I found in my dog’s mouth. Seriously. You could not make this shit up. He’d stolen it from the sofa and was chomping away. So I stored the block with the cc and phoned Opodo back, but seriously! You couldn’t make it up! I now need a new cc on top of everything else. 😂

Hopefully that is the end of the issue.

Well, I think if anyone deserves a holiday, it’s you! Have a wonderful time.

😩poor you.
The service companies offer nowadays is sh*t.
They won't employ staff to answer phones but top management who won't have to suffer the delay in answering their phone call will be on mega bucks.

Just to say, we did successfully get to Orlando and back. 😂

We were supposed to have a 5 hour layover in Dublin but the first flight was delayed by 3.5 hours, first because of a mechanical problem and then it took an hour to sort out who was getting to fly and who wasn’t - at first they said EVERYONE with a connecting flight was not getting on, but then backed down to those who were obviously going to miss their connection. It was utter chaos with staff calling out (at the boarding gate) the individual connecting flights so passengers could go to the desk, be removed from the flight and then their luggage removed from boarding. Lots of unhappy passengers who would have preferred to at least get to Dublin. By the time we got to Dublin and through immigration, our flight was boarding, so it was close but we made it!

Glad you got there in the end!

Whoa, that was close! Glad you got there 😁
Now relax and enjoy the hols! 🇺🇸 ⛱

Thanks for the update 😃