When Benjamin Eckstein’s JetBlue airline tickets disappeared, he didn’t know what to do. Should he call his online travel agent? Buy new tickets at the airport? Drive instead?
But it’s a 3,127-mile road trip from Boston to San Jose. That would have taken almost 50 hours nonstop. No, motoring cross-country with a wife and two young kids wasn’t what Eckstein had in mind.
Instead, he bought a new ticket to San Francisco on United Airlines the next day and tried to sort things out with his airline and travel agency.
He couldn’t.
And that’s when Eckstein reached out to my advocacy team. He learned how easy it is for an airline ticket to disappear — and how hard it is to get it back. He also found out that when that happens, no one wants to take responsibility for it. Often, it’s the hapless passenger who has to eat the replacement cost.
But will the same thing happen to Eckstein?
How did these airline tickets disappear?
Eckstein’s tale of disappearing airline tickets started last summer when he arrived at the JetBlue counter at Boston Logan Airport.
“When I got to the airport with my family, JetBlue had no record for these flights, even though we had confirmation numbers for the tickets,” he says.
First stop? His online travel agency, Orbitz.
“I tried to call Orbitz,” he says. “The calls disconnected twice, and we had to call back and start the conversation with someone new. Eventually, a representative told me there was nothing they could do for us at the time, and we had to wait for a…