some of you may or not be aware of this complaint from the thorntree forum (lonely planet) but i want to let as many people know about it as possible as ebooker's treatment of its customers is an outrage and the sooner everyone knows about it the better.

on 29th april one of the guys on that forum (paul) booked a ticket with ebookers to go to thailand, however the following day someone phoned up and cancelled this ticket. the person who phoned up was not paul so when he turned up to catch his flight he was turned away. ebookers confirmed that he'd cancelled the flight (£440) and refunded the money to his account minus a cancellation fee. when paul disputed this with him they said there was nothing they could do as he was the one who'd made the phone call. to date the refunded money has not gone into his account.

not only this but every call made to ebookers is recorded however ebookers now refuses to play this phone conversation down the phone to him (which i'm sure is illegal!). after spending go knows how long at the airport paul eventually had to pay an extra £900+ pounds to buy another ticket so he could actually get to thailand.

this isn't the first time this has happened and many other people have had problems using this company. If you are going to book a plane ticket with anyone please, please, please do yourself a favour and use another company. if you'd like to read more about this and other problems with this company go to the LP website and do a search on ebookers. alternatively it shouldn't take you too long just doing a search on a web directory.

Ebookers are a shocking company, I won't touch them again with a barge pole. I tried to book an hotel on their site but after entering all my details, address, credit card info etc, it didn't work and I got an email from them saying due to a problem with their site my booking had not been made and to phone them and make another booking. Fair enough, but also on this email-sent in plain text and also forwarded to about 4 other departments all over India was my name, my address, my full credit card number, expiry date, and even the the security number from the back of the card.

I was mad as hell, the golden rule of internet security- do not send sensitive info as a plain text email, the small print on their web site even says "we take security very seriously, at no time are your details ever sent un-securely over the internet"

I emailed and complained, got a "sorry it won't happen again" email, so I emailed customer services but they just decided to ignore me.

I always use Expedia and Octopus travel now.

Ebookers are scum
This is my conclusion after my experience and from what I've read online.

Their service is great. Friendly, Resonsive...*** UNTIL YOU PAY ***. They charged my credit card twice, I made about 8 attempts to phone the direct line of my consultant. I sent him about 5 emails. I sent about 3-4 emails to other support email addresses on the ebookers website.
To date no ebookers staff have contacted me. The double payment was silently withdrawn.
This was months ago.
I need to change my flight times, and I'm trying to get in contact with them and they still do not respond. (customer service aswell as the consultant i delt with)

Ebookers: unfair and possibly dishonest?

I have bought from ebookers a pair of return flight tickets from Manchester to Rio at 9.30pm on Tuesday 9/9/2009. Shortly after I have found that the same ticket was cheaper elsewhere (eg, at lastminute.co.uk and expedia.co.uk). No problem, I thought, for ebooker offers a "Best Price Guarantee".

The next morning I phoned them and was asked to say where I had found a cheaper offer. I mentioned expedia.com, the ebookers representative checked expedia's website and told me "yes, print this out and send it to us", which I promptly did. The email went to them at 12pm.

However, and contrary to what I heard in that first phone call, there was a problem with that expedia.com offer: the first leg of the return flight (Rio to Paris CDG) was two hours earlier than in my ebookers reservation, in which I hadn't specified any preferred time (route, airline and class were the same).

Ebookers wrote to me saying that the first printout was no good at 10.37pm, 25 five hours after my initial booking. I then sent them another printout (this time from lastminute.co.uk, which I had also saved when I realised the price difference), in which every single detail of the trip was EXACTLY as in my purchase. Then their answer was "as you're sending this more than 24 hours after your booking, no refund".

The refund I was expecting should be of 192 or 476 pounds, depending on what other price the ebookers one was compared to.

In my opinion, ebookers has been unfair. Whether they have also been dishonest, that is something I'll leave for you to decide.