June 9th: I bought 2 flight tickets on Kayak.com (through Travelocity); the total amount (5, 268.06 AUD) was displayed in my bank account’s “pending transactions” under the heading "SABRE INC KE KOREAN AIR KE SAN ANTO".
June 12th: Travelocity deducted two times 2, 642.71 AUD (under the heading "Usd2484.40 Korean Air 18072345"), plus 79.28 USD "Foreign Currency Conversion Fee". However, the abovementioned 5, 268.06 AUD remained in the pending transactions list until June 17th!!! This meant that even though I had money on my account, I was unable to access it (since it was less than 5, 268.06 AUD). My available balance was 0 AUD.
June 13th: I called my bank (St. George) and they told me to talk to Travelocity and ask them to send the bank a fax authorizing the bank to delete this pending transaction. My bank said they would delete this pending transaction one hour after receiving the fax. After this I called Travelocity immediately (at around midnight US time). I was put on hold for half an hour; then finally I was put through to an operator. After I explained the situation to her she promised to send the fax within an hour. She read back to me all the details I’d dictated to her and I confirmed she had all the right details.
The next day I checked my bank account and the pending transaction was STILL THERE. I called my bank again and they said they never received a fax from Travelocity. They also said that the pending transaction would automatically be removed after one week, and that until that time there was nothing I could do about this unless Travelocity sent them an authorization fax.
After this I had no success in reaching Travelocity, but to be honest I didn’t see too much point in trying to reach them since they’d failed to send the authorization fax the first time I asked them.
I had to wait until June 17th – that is, FIVE DAYS – until the pending transaction was finally deleted from my account. This meant that I HAD NO ACCESS TO MY OWN MONEY for 5 days!!!
My question to you is this: how is it possible for Travelocity to take the liberty of locking 5, 268.06 AUD on my account, after you had already deducted the price of the 2 flight tickets? Do you guys at Travelocity think that I have an extra 5, 268.06 on my account AUD that you can freely lock in?? Well, since I did NOT have this much extra money, I ended up being unable to access my own money for five full days. And what about my electronic fund transfers? But I don’t know why I suppose you care about this…
I have bought quite a few flight tickets (and other things too) in my life which also involved having a certain amount of money locked in on my account (in “pending transactions”). However, I have NEVER had an experience like this one, namely that the money was STILL locked even after the price of what I’d paid for had already been deducted from my account!!! I simply cannot believe that a company would take such liberties with its customers!! Not to mention the fact that your colleague promised me she would send a fax authorization and then completely failed to do so. Shame on you, Travelocity, for outrageous customer service.
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