One thing I have been meaning to mention for some time is a not so cool experience I had with a travel website over the holidays.

Recently I booked two tickets to go to New York at Easter. This isn’t for work, it’s purely pleasure. I reckon what with my degree coming up later this year, this’ll be my last chance to be going anywhere for a while, so I’m making this trip a good ‘un.

But I digress. I had finally booked the flights via Expedia, but I did have an unpleasant experience with Netflights.com. You know that old adage, if it’s too good to be true, it usually is? Not that their prices were brilliantly low in comparison to other sites, but there was a few quid difference to make me think I was getting a bit of a bargain.

There was a bit of a sale going on with flights these past few weeks and Netflights were selling Virgin Atlantic tickets for around £300. Virgin’s own site were selling the same tickets, same flight times, for around £340. Bargain I thought, so I tried to book the two seats. When I put in my credit card details a message popped up telling me I had to call Netflights direct. Bit strange I thought. I knew it wasn’t the card. So I called them. Which wasn’t cheap I might add. Not only is it not a local number, I was kept waiting for a good 20mins.

When I finally got through, guess what they told me? That these flights didn’t exist but they’re happy to sell me more expensive flights. It was all I could do to refrain from chucking a few expletives down the phone at them. What a waste of time and my money. What ticked me off was that they had my credit card details. So the next thing I did when I got off the phone with Netflights was to call my credit card company and warn them of any transactions coming from this website.

And this isn’t a fly-by-night website. I like to think I know what I’m doing when it comes to checking out and using sites. Netflights aren’t only ABTA and ATOL bonded, they’re a subsidiary of Thomas Cook. If you’re not in the UK, Thomas Cook is a travel company that’s been in business for over a hundred years. Indeed, Thomas Cook (the bloke the company’s named after) was the inventor of the package holiday here. Not to mention at the bottom of their main page, they have all sorts of travel awards they supposedly won.

Anyway, I’m not going to tell you not to use Netflights.com, but I will suggest that you use them with caution. You may have even used them already and had no problems.  As I said before, I finally found flights with Continental Airlines via Expedia and they were a pleasure to deal with. And here’s a tip when using Expedia, if you can’t find your flights or hotel dates on their website, it’s worth giving them a call. I got the exact times I wanted for our itinerary which wasn’t on their site. It seems their computers are updated quicker than their website.