Hi All,
Recently went to book some flights to Aus for a larger family group, approx. 20 people, AirNZ had some good flights deals in their 72 hr special. As you can only book ~7 people per booking online I thought ah House of Travel are showing some similar rates on their Mix and Match i'll go in and book all 20 through them.
This is what happened next:
1. Mix and Match is part of House of Travel(HOT) but HOT cant access those prices and said would be different.
2. Agent wouldn't give me a straight up price said they needed to enter all the details to check if there were enough seats at the good rates.
3. After waiting for them to enter everything the price ended up being around $60 more pp than through the mix and match site. *sigh*
4. Told them we weren't interested at that rate we will just go online.
This is where the real fun began!! As the agent had reserved the seats we could no longer go online as airnz and mix and match weren't showing those seats as being available at the deal rate anymore!!
Long story short we asked the agent to release the seats as we did not want to proceed with them, they say they did but the deal seats never showed back up in airnz online booking or anywhere!! The sale has lapsed and now i'm furious!
Anyone else had this happen, I feel like I have been scammed by the agent and seems like anticompetitive behavior?
Does anyone know how this works? should all the reservation and un-reservation of seats be instant?