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May 26, 2005
Faith Restored
After my weekend plans were suddenly cancelled, I decided to take advantage of an ESavers flight to Buffalo. Of course, I was just there and lord knows I don't really want to stay for very long, but my mother is celebrating her new marriage with a big shindig (food, booze, drunk uncles...) and I thought it would be nice to surprise her.
So after booking the flight (arriving in the Buff around 8:30pm Saturday, back in Boston by 4:30 Sun) I got the grand idea to rent a car. Afterall, I'm 25 now! Well the prices were all a bit high so I decided to try naming my price via priceline. So I do what you do on those sort of sites: enter the pick up date and time, drop off date and time, preferences, submit and BOOM! you get denied or approved.
Well, my $30 bid was approved (whoohoo!) which means I've automatically billed. So, I printed out my little confirmation sheet and suddenly realize that the pick up date is Thur May 26 and drop off Fri May 27. :DOH: My immediate response was: stupid girl, you somehow selected the wrong dates! So I hit the back button a bunch of times and I sadly see the Thur, Fri dates through the confirmation page... but when I get to the first step where you enter the information, the correct dates are there!
Ok, ok... obviously I did something wrong here. So I open a new browser window and start all over (I'm already screwed but I want to make sure it was my fault). Select the dates, times, preferences, submit... Boom! Well there it was - the search results came back defaulting to today. So, they were obviously having some sort of technical issue ... even if it was my fault for not checking before I hit confirm... but who does that?!
So long story longer, I proceeded to call and write and yadda, yadda. They finally agreed to "cancel" my reservation with a "cancellation fee" of 1 rental day... which means I'm still paying for it. WHAT?! I'm pissed so I write and call some more... I finally get a call from the first poor soul I spoke with this morning to tell me that they have confirmed that there was a technical problem with their search engine and I should expect a full refund in 7-10 business days.
So there you have it. Priceline is good people, albeit slow on the refund. Now the question is... do I try to name my price again for the correct dates? Or just make my sister pick me up from the airport?