The many voyages of Sinbad: When cheap costs you dearly

“Seven Hundred and Fifty dollars for a round trip flight to Mecca!!”
“Are you out of your mind?”

When I first heard that there was such a flight to Saudi Arabia and back, I was shocked. I thought that my wife must be wrong. There has got be some trick to this—maybe some hidden clause. You see, tickets in the spring to Saudi generally run around fifteen hundred dollars—seven fifty made us salivate. After confirmation, we immediately went into action: we sent the money to the agent; we got our inoculations (100 dollars a piece); and we sent our passports for visas.

After these formalities were over, we checked on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s web page and found that Umrah (pilgrimage) visas were free. The travel agents had initially charged us a two hundred dollar fee per person. His reasoning being that they had to get the visa from Riyadh; the visa was not free. When we pointed out that is not what the web site said, we were given some garbled explanation and told that he would only charge us 187 dollars. At that point, we figured let the agent have a break. It turned out to be one of the worst experiences we had. The entire saga, and saga it was, is too long to document in a blog; suffice is to say we were had. We did not get our visas in time; we could not go.

Now came the next part. The agent said that the airlines would not give us all our money back, because we had not let the airlines know about the cancellation in time. He had the cheek to say this after assuring us that everything will be fine, and we will board on time, even if he had to hand carry our passports to the plane. Well, the lack of full refund did not go over well with us. At this point, we insisted on getting our money back and asked for a full refund along with the money for the visa. We would chalk up the poor service to experience. However, appealing to reason did not help; appealing to good sense did not work; and appealing through friends got us no results. It turned out the Sindbad had sent many people on many splendid voyages controlled by him—people who through sheer frustration, gave in to work on the agent’s schedule, rather than their own. We were not going to take this lying down. I thus drafted a detailed letter and threatened to take him to court. After Three Months, he paid us every penny.

It was the worst experience that I have ever had with a travel agent, and as my wife put it:

“You can use the power of the pen, what about those who cannot?”

Have you ever had such an experience? Do you think IATA needs to have stricter certification of travel agents? What are your thoughts? Talk to me.


Riaz Sahibzada