nwa.com: Flight Selections

At about 9:15pm on June 5, I pulled up this flight combination for $218. When I clicked "Select," the price jumped to $291. When I tried the search again, the price became $363 for the flight combination. As you can imagine, this shocked and confused me. I called 1-800-225-2525 to speak with a booking agent, and after some difficulty with the voice recognition answering service, became connected after a very short wait. The booking agent was, as you can imagine, not very helpful. His hands were tied, and I wish it were not so.

I understand the reality of airline flight prices and the real problems with making them a real-time internet commodity. Sometimes, occurences like what happened to me happen; by the time I hit the right database, the flight had increased in price. That said, there's little way to make it not look like a bait-and-switch. I strongly recommend you allow for human override of price increases within 15-30 minutes of the increase, or build in a system to offer tickets locked in at certain prices for certain amounts of time (ticketmaster.com does this fairly well). Otherwise, what happened to me - which sent me running, not walking, over to US Airways - will keep happening.

I had hoped to leave a scathing review of the customer service system on the survey that the automated voice asked me to answer while I was on hold; however, when the agent hung up, no survey followed.

If you're going to have your automated calling program offer a survey, make sure the survey is actually offered. Nothing confirms a perceived lack of customer care like an improperly implemented customer survey. It was more than a little insulting to be asked to take a minute to answer a survey, and then find out that my time would not be necessary after all.

I now urge you to take a minute of your time to consider my complaint and suggestions. I appreciate any input you can offer on this matter, and I can assure you that your time is valuable to me.