Booking Airfare

[sayhello]

My experience was also with a virtuoso TA.

What is Virtuoso?

Sayhello

 

[tgeorge]

What is Virtuoso?

Sayhello

They focus on luxury travel and can typically help get you VIP perks through their extensive network. I used her for a cruise and then when I went back to book with her again she wanted to charge me a fee. I was actually quite taken aback since I had already done a lot of the work myself and didn't have many questions. I get that people need to make a living, and if I had booked and canceled multiple times, I would understand, but I thought the commission she was making was probably sufficient to cover her expenses. Maybe that is just me being naive, but i was very put off by it. I've found out her TA's that I use for various trips and they not only provide me with great service, but never, ever ask me to pay them a fee

 

[AquamarineSteph]

I have flown both Delta and AA here in the States, and I have to say that they are both equally bad about changing flight info, equipment, etc. This carries over to their overseas partners when we've flown from the US to another country and back again. I have just always assumed that this is a part of travel, regardless of the airline carrier.

 

[Cinderella's Slipper 2015]

Wow, I guess we're lucky then. We haven't had too many issues when it comes to our planes or our flights being changed when we're flying within North America. Air Canada and WestJet don't tend to change their planes around too much unless there is an operational need for it. Like they might put you onto a smaller or larger plane depending on demand but very rarely do our flight times change drastically. They might change by five minutes or something, unless it's being impacted by a major storm. The only major issue we had was when Korean up and decided they weren't flying out of Siem Reap anymore and moved our flight to be out of Phnom Phen instead when we weren't anywhere near there but they were very accommodating in rebooking us on a different flights to get us back to our original connection back to Seoul to Toronto. Granted we had other issues with them that will make us never fly with them again but that's not relevant to this. We're looking at British Airways for our next trip so will see how that goes.

 

[RebelHawk]

I guess everyone's experiences vary. I have flown enough to maintain gold status with Delta for the past 7 years. Sure I have had flight cancelations and unexpected time/gate changes but no worse than I have on other airlines. I also never carry my luggage on but check it every time I fly. In all of these flights I have only ever lost my luggage twice and both of those times was when connecting into Canada with Air Canada so I just blamed them.

As far as booking with ABD vs on my own I used points for our Peru ABD trip last year and we certainly had no issues. I even used Marriott points for the extra nights we booked. I notified my awesome Dreams Unlimited TA of what we were doing and she noted our trip details with ABD. We also just booked our flights for our upcoming NYC ABD trip and did the same as our Peru trip. Here is crossing my fingers that I didn't just jinx our flight. =)