RyanOrbitz

That would be the name of the ugly lovechild which would result from the union of Ryanair and Orbitz. I think of myself as generally level headed but was almost driven to the point of insanity where I would have needed to be wheeled away in a straight jacket.

Orbitz is a sneaky little rat of a company. For one thing, they make their complaint department's contact information so hard that it seems much like an astronaut in a space station trying to pinpoint the exact location of a microscopic organism with the naked eye. Even after plundering through every link on their website, I still had to resort to online chatting with a representative to ask for the address. Seriously? They have to know that their service sucks harder than a Miele vacuum (man, vacuum is the weirdest looking word) to go to that much trouble. I guess they figure that this way they have less of an avalanche of incoming mail because most people won't want to make the effort to find the address. In case anyone else wants to rant and rave to Orbitz about their service which makes French waiters look good, here is where you can send a letter:

500 W. Madison, Suite 1000 Chicago, Illinois 60661.

I'm sure you all want to hear about my oh-so-pleasant experience about how Orbitz rubbed me the wrong way so without further ado...

I spent an accumulation of over three hours with around 5 different customer service agents over the two days, and had seldom been more frustrated in my life. The purpose of my call to this department was to make a simple change to my flight itinerary, and to leave earlier than I had originally scheduled. The first agent I contacted to make this change informed me that I would need to cancel my entire reservation, which included two other flights (it was a multi-city itinerary), and then buy a new one. She told me that a refund would be issued to me for the first ticket in 45 days, which is a significant amount of time to wait for such a large amount of money, but I accepted and told her that I was alright with that. She found a new itinerary which was acceptable to me, and then placed me on hold to complete the transaction. I was on hold for around 15 minutes and the call was dropped. I waited about 10 minutes and received no return phone call, so I called again and was placed with a different agent. I explained what happened, and he told me something completely different than the first agent- that I would need to make these changes with United. He then told me that he would get a United customer service agent for me and transfer the call. He placed me on hold, and I had to hang up after 30 minutes because I never got a response.

At this point, I was getting frustrated to the degree that trying to do a 9x9 Rubiks cube would put me at, so I was pleased when I was connected with an agent who finally, it seemed, knew what she was doing. She said that she was sorry for the inconvenience and that she could make the change easily to a flight two days earlier and just would have to charge me a change fee. I said I understood so she went ahead and made the change, so I thought that the whole ordeal was finally solved. However, the next morning I received an urgent message from Orbitz on my voice mail saying that I needed to call them about my reservation. I called and explained my situation, and I was placed on hold for about two hours while the agent attempted to sort out all of the issues. She then got back to me telling me that I needed to call United the next day to sort all of it out on my own. This was one of the most frustrating moments I have ever experienced.

Now, if Orbitz decided to start booking flights on the demons of the air Ryanair, it would bring frustrations to levels so high that doctors would have to start handing out Xanax as if it were candy just to keep people from breaking out in riots and killing each other. That, or the world would implode.