To all of you naysayers out there who have poo-pooed Twitter and denied its inherent usefulness, this post is for you.
I booked a round trip ticket from Detroit to Hyderabad in January through a website called Vayama.com. Three weeks after arriving in India I found out my mother had breast cancer. As the weeks wore on and the news kept getting worse and worse I decided it was time to come home, so I called Vayama to change my return flight date. The problem was that I wanted to fly directly to Chicago instead of Detroit, which meant I had to deal with Northwest Airlines directly.
I spoke to a rep at Northwest who told me that they did not have a medical emergency policy for international flights. I found that little fact interesting and completely ridiculous. My only option was to cancel the return flight, and purchase a new one-way ticket at the low price of $1300 (which was magically more expensive than the original round trip ticket). This, of course, was only for a flight from Mumbai to Chicago and would leave me to find my own way from Hyderabad to Mumbai. I proceeded to articulate my thoughts on the absurdity of the situation, and may or may not have shamelessly pulled the cancer card on this individual.
The Northwest rep recommended that I email the refund center (you know where that's going) because they usually grant requests in this sort of situation , which begs the question of why there isn't an medical emergency policy for international flights. So, I emailed them. And waited. And checked the refund status. And waited, until finally, the verdict was in. The refund was denied. So, I called. I was passed around to 6 different reps until someone finally admitted that the refund center doesn't actually answer their phone and suggested I email them. Nice, huh?
So, I emailed them again. This time I pulled out all the stops. Not even the Pope could have matched the guilt trip I laid out in this email. The next day I received a response saying that $651.21 had been refunded to Vayama on my behalf. And this, my friends, was the easy part.
Let me take this painfully drawn out story and get down to the point. I emailed Vayama and got no response. I called the first time and was told that the credit had been issued. It didn't show up. I called a second time three weeks later and was told it was issued on June 1. This particular rep blamed it on my credit card company gave me an actual confirmation number that he swore they could use to hunt it down (I expressed my doubts). Credit card company laughed at me for believing her and recommended issuing a charge back. The third time I called to request a credit slip so that I could begin the charge back process. This rep said she would put in the credit request for me that day and it should appear within a week. She also promised me a credit memo via email by the end of the day. I never got it.
So, what's a tech-savvy girl to do in this Web 3.0 world? Tweet about it. I sent a tweet recommending that the Twitter community snub this website, and guess what? Someone at Vayama responded to me. The response was weak, but I had their attention. So I responded to them highlighting their inadequacies and the fact that they still owe me $656.21. You can read the entire threatening sequence of tweets at http://twitter.com/thesecondfiddle.
Today, in my inbox I received the following email from a Mr. David Rush:
Dear Gina –
It has just been brought to my attention that the refund of your ticket purchased through vayama had not been handled well at all. To that end let me first apologize for the complete breakdown in service processing on our part. I take these issues very seriously and have already initiated research to determine what caused our failure to handle your request quickly and efficiently.
I can tell you that your refund has been FINALLY processed and you should see a credit of $656.21 appear on your credit card account within a few days. If you don’t have this credit by Monday, please give me a call at the number below and I’ll take further action.
Due to poor handling of your refund, I am sending you an Electronic Coupon with a value of $50 to be used toward a future vayama International Air ticket purchase. This will come to you via a separate email with instructions on how to apply the coupon value.
Again, I apologize for the poor service you experienced. This is certainly NOT what our customers should experience. But I can also tell you it is certainly not the norm for us either. I can only hope that my response and offer meet with your approval to the extent you will take advantage of the credit being extended to you and use vayama in the future.
Sincerely,
David
How's that for a response? Now why would Vayama go out of their way to right their wrongdoing? Because news on Twitter travels fast. Lightning fast. Every subscriber to Vayama's feed saw my comments. And it's searchable, which means that anyone else looking for travel deals from Vayama is likely to come across my comments.
Making waves in Twitterland has been known to resolve a few customer service issues. Mine is not the first and it certainly won't be the last. So, on behalf of every Twitterer who has seen justice come out of 140 characters or less, thank you Twitter, for democratizing the web.
gv
