A few months ago, we here at Flight Wisdom spun off a new blog/site, Infrequent Flier, which we hoped to do some advice stories for the less frequent traveler. One of our posts was on Cheapoair, entitled You Get What You Pay For – Cheapoair.
We have never patronized Cheapoair, so we went out onto the Internet for tales of horror. And to be fair, people did have nice things to say, but considering what happened today, we have doubts about the legitimacy of that. Our sites accept comments, and log the time, date, and IP address of all posters. We received two comments on the post within 10 minutes of each other. Not only that…they used the same return email address.
meredith said: October 12th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
HereI recently purchased had a great experience with CheapoAir.com. I accidentallybooked the wrong flight. I called the customer service line and spoke with Peter. He was so helpful in walking me through and showing me how to change my flight!Benefits:
By far, CheapoAir.com had the cheapest flights of any service. I was skeptical at first but decided to give it a try. I found the site extremely easy to navigate and was very impressed with the way it gave me comparisons. It listed the different airlines, the flight times I could choose from and broke them down by price starting with the least expensive and moving up to the most expensive.The website is also extremely easy to use and navigate. It provide a list of all available flights in less than ten seconds which was great.
Negatives:
Prices for flights tend to change somewhat quickly. I was recently looking for a flight to Denver. It was $149. When I got back from the store, the price had jumped to $229. My advice is that when you see a good deal, take it!Other than that, I had no problems. I got my e-tickets, customer service was helpful, and booking was simple.
Conclusion
I was able to book my flight at a much cheaper price than I had expected and was also able to collect bonus miles on my frequent flier account for booking this way.
I’ll never bother with the irritation of a travel agent again. I can do this from the comfort of my home and it is so much quicker!
CheapoAir.com is definitely the best site I came across!
Recommended:
YesRecommended:
Yes
Now, that is a perfectly innocuous comment logged from IP address 69.47.123.170, which is assigned to an internet service provider in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. This address specifically indicates it came from Michigan.
Now, the sympathetic message from Renee at Cheapoair…
Renee Cheapoair Customer Assistance said:
October 12th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
I am very sorry to hear that a customer had a bad experience using our services. Cheapoair is dedicated to resolving issues and concerns in a timely and satisfactory manner.Cheapoair offers 24/7 customer support at 212-478-0335, or the best way to email: feedback@chepoair.com, this address is also listed on our “contact us†page.
If at anytime you need further assistance, you can contact me at: randrews@cheapoair.com. Cheapoair values your business!
The messages are tagged 9 minutes apart on a post and Renee used her email address listed in her message to supply for the first post. And this has been done before. We did a search for the text of the first post…here is a link to it on Epinions.com. We get the feeling Cheapoair regularly sends Renee or another colleague out to post some complimentary comments and her offer of assistance(with liberal misspellings).
This doesn’t endear us to a company we already had a slew of stories about, some of which we heard firsthand that we couldn’t thus post, as we needed them in writing.
So, in the end, don’t buy from Cheapoair. It is not like other companies don’t have people doing this, but it is just sloppy. And you don’t want a sloppy company handling your vacations.