A note on travel agents and shipping

Do. Not. Use. cheaptickets.com

I booked my flight with cheaptickets.com. My original itinerary was to take off from Albuquerque to Los Angeles, three hour layover, LA to Taipei, Taiwan, two hour layover, Taipei to Osaka.

They managed to lose my flight from Los Angeles to Taipei. The other two tickets were still valid, but a few days ago the Malaysia Airlines flight from LA to Taipei got cancelled. The agents at cheaptickets gave me a call and said that I was being switched to a different flight. Well, when I got to the airport tonight, I found out that they hadn't actually done that. The ticketing agent for United (who was absolutely wonderful) managed to fix it, but there was a lot of phoning, holding, and stress involved. I finally had a connecting flight again an hour before the scheduled takeoff of my departing flight.

As a side note, cheaptickets's hold music is Pachelbel's Canon in D. About three or four minutes of it, and that's it. Between the ticket fiasco and trying to find out about an extra checked luggage item earlier, I spent about two and a half hours on hold today--they are completely inept at getting anything resolved, let alone quickly, and will put you on hold "for a moment" after one or two questions, where "a moment" really means thirty minutes. I'm still too frazzled at the moment to properly describe their sheer incompetence.

I booked with cheaptickets because they had the cheapest ticket price. I saved maybe a hundred dollars because of it. My first lesson to pass on to any other first-time international travelers: buy from a name you've heard of before. A big company that's been around a while might be worth the extra money in the event that something goes wrong.

On a completely separate note from the airline, one of the things that I had planned all along was to take a bike with me to Japan. I have a pretty decent road bike--nothing too flashy, but it was worth a lot more than I paid for it--and a while ago I had gotten a UPS shipping quote for it saying it would cost me something like $171.80 to ship it directly to my dorm in Kyoto. That was a little bit more expensive than the cheapest new bikes I can expect to buy on the Japanese side of things, and not much more expensive than shipping a bike to some places in the continental US, so I was quite excited about that.

I went to print the shipping label today and it was $645.23. I decided not to do it. All indications after speaking with their customer service say that the rate calculator on the web site must have been completely screwed up, because no combination of mistakes we could think of gave us anything less than double the old figure. I suppose the lesson here is not to check a shipping estimate until something is actually boxed and weighed, so that if the price seems too good to be true, you can run with it right there.