This week we had an emergency. Brother-in-laws father went to Berlin for a surgery that went terribly wrong. They called me in a panic to help them buy last minute tickets because the doctors told them they needed to be there as soon as possible. I found tickets for the next day at a price that between the family were able to scrape together at short notice but they needed a credit card to book. I would have used mine but unfortunately due to construction around the house my available balance wasn't enough to cover the ticket price. One of our friends came to the rescue and offered to let us use her credit card to book the tickets and pay her back the next day when we had the total balance of the bill. We put all the information in all the right places and I was a little concerned that there was no place to put the security code from the back of the card. I called a few minutes after to make sure everything was okay and the tickets would be issued correctly and talked to veronica (who by the way is very nice and tried to be helpful). Imagine my shock when first thing in the morning I find they have cancelled my reservations and when I check the time its over 5 hours after the reservation were made. When I call to find out what happened they tell me the contact phone number was wrong. The contact number is not wrong because I was the contact. They used my phone number to verify the credit card even though I indicated on the booking form that the card holder was not the same as the contact person. They have no place on the form for the security number nor the credit card holders registered telephone number nor do they indicate it is even needed in the credit card information area. While we were booking the tickets the customer service people are nice enough but NOW there's a problem and all the customer service reps (I talked to at least 3 of them) are incapable of helping and even worse extremely condescending. If they had been helpful or even sympathetic it would have gone a long way. I re-booked on Flight Hub which by the way actually has a form that you can enter all the information for a 3rd party credit card and still put the person who needs to be contacted about the booking as the contact person.
Due to this mess up these boys are sitting for another 24 hours waiting to be at their fathers bed side and the hospital phoned this morning to say they are not sure if he is going to make it. This is absolute torture for them. Not to mention that they had to ask around the family for another $400 dollars for the new flight so they could keep the money they converted to Euro for living expenses in Berlin.
Apparently there is no number to call about complains and the only was to complain is to leave them an email on their sales form, but I managed to find the CEO's company email and write to him. Lets see if he gets the form fixed so something like this never happens to anyone else.

UPDATE... Unfortunately the boys didn't arrive in time to see their dad alive. While nothing will quite make up for the lost time that cost us so much, Flight Network really tried to put things right. We had a senior Manager work very closely with us to get the boys home for the same price as the lost tickets. The price of one way tickets home had gone up ridiculously by the time the boys were ready to come home and it was a big help to have someone else hunt down tickets and do all the work for us. We have been assured that the form on the site will be updated to make space for all the information needed for a third party credit card so that a legitimate emergency use will not be mistaken for credit fraud. We have also been assured that staff has already been receiving training on when to pass a situation up to a manager for an emergency resolution immediately and when to refer a customer to the website for resolution.

Mistakes can and will happen at the worst possible times, no one can escape this but one can always hope that the same mistake never happens and lessons are learned. I wish that this mistake had been resolved on the phone the day it happened instead of by angry posts and emails but even so I am satisfied with the help received after the fact. After dealing with management I would give Flight Network another shot with vacation plans.....