How to Make the Travelocity Corporate Office Listen

Travelocity is supposed to make its customers’ vacation experiences much better. But in reality, they often make mistakes when it comes to billing, refunds, or even improper reservations. When you try to confront them about their error, you might find that you aren’t able to make their corporate offices listen, let alone obtain a resolution to your satisfaction.

What is there to do? In fact, you do have some ways to make Travelocity’s corporate offices listen. Let us explain.

Use Arbitration to Settle Your Complaint with Travelocity

Using Travelocity, you can rent cars, hotels, and many more services or luxuries from their platform. But if you ever have an issue with these services, you might find that it’s almost impossible to get a hold of their customer service team or make their corporate office listen. In fact, Travelocity is historically pretty awful when it comes to customer service or offering real resolutions for legitimate complaints.

You won’t be able to take Travelocity to court, as the company is protected from regular lawsuits as a result of the contracts they use for each customer interaction. But while a traditional lawsuit is out of the question, there is another option you can pursue called independent arbitration.

With this process, you’ll hire an arbitrator that can neutrally and fairly look at the grievance against Travelocity and come up with a legally binding settlement. What’s more is that Travelocity’s contracts that prevent you from taking them to court with a traditional lawsuit do allow you to negotiate settlements for complaints through arbitration.

Arbitration is Fair, Just, Reasonable, and Transparent

The arbitration proceedings will likely be handled by the American Arbitration Association. As a result, they will comply with the Statement of Principles of Consumer Due Process Protocol. This means that:

• The arbitration process will be fair for both parties and the independent, qualified arbitrator will look at both sides as impartially as possible
• Throughout the hearing, reasonable standards will be upheld in regard to cost, accessibility for information and location, and party equity. In other words, it won’t be too difficult for you to attend and take part in in the hearing
• The hearing will be ultimately transparent, so any resulting agreements will be easy to understand and both parties shall be allowed to hire additional representation
• There will be alternatives to arbitration offered in certain cases, including mediation and small claims court
• Whatever decision the arbitrator ends up making will be considered just and legally binding, and decisions can include both awards or penalties

Arbitration Gives You, the Customer, Leverage

Companies like Travelocity are notorious for ignoring customer complaints and demands until they become, well, unignorable. Arbitration makes your grievance just that by showing Travelocity that you aren’t going to sit down and take their treatment. When they realize arbitration is on the table, they might just become more open to negotiation and hearing your complaints.

Arbitration doesn’t give Travelocity a better chance of winning like a regular court case might. Furthermore, Travelocity knows that they’ll have to pay some amount of money to prepare for the arbitration hearing, and possibly pay even more if they lose the case. All of these factors could make the Travelocity corporate office listen.

But they still might decide against hearing you out fairly, even with all these factors. In this case, rest assured that you won’t have to pay a penny unless you end up winning your case. With FairShake, we don’t charge you anything until all is said and done, meaning you can get a fair and just hearing even you don’t have a lot of cash.

This being said, you should still only use independent arbitration for serious complaints instead of frivolous issues. If the arbitrator decides that your complaint is indeed minor, they might have you pay for any of the costs Travelocity builds up or the arbitration hearing.

Leverage Can Lead to Faster Settlements and Real Resolutions

Since arbitration puts you on equal footing with Travelocity, you’ll likely find that their corporate offices are much more willing to talk to you about your complaint, even if they were ignoring you before. You may even get a faster settlement then you realize.

That’s because before filing for arbitration, you have to formally raise your intentions to do so with Travelocity. FairShake can assist with both this part of the process and the others.

We can send Travelocity a demand letter that starts a 30-day countdown, before the end of which the company must either start negotiation with you or offer a satisfactory resolution for your complaint. Otherwise, we’ll start the arbitration process. Your contract with Travelocity likely stipulates a window similar to this to give them time to come up with a response.

The good news? In about half of all arbitration cases, the corporate company offers a resolution satisfactory to the customer before the 30-day countdown has finished. On the other hand, if they don’t lift a finger to try to fix things with you, you can start formally filing for arbitration by contacting the American Arbitration Association. At FairShake, we can help you both with the filing paperwork and with the rest of the arbitration proceedings.

Do I Need an Attorney?

Upon starting the arbitration proceedings, you’ll be given the option to hire an attorney for additional representation and legal help.

Why should you consider hiring an attorney? In short, an attorney can more easily point out particular laws or statutes that might apply to your unique complaint or case. This, in turn, can make it easier for the arbitrator to rule in your favor or award a high settlement. But you can also represent yourself; check out this page from the American Arbitration Association’s Pro Se Case Administration Team for additional information.

Representing yourself is fine, but be aware that cases that deal with robocalls, improper debt collection, and other issues are often more easily handled with an attorney’s assistance.

What Can I Do Next?

You can start the arbitration proceedings by filling out the contact form below and explaining your issues with Travelocity. At FairShake, we’ll take your complaints seriously and help you with every part of the arbitration process. We also offer a 100% guarantee and won’t charge you anything unless you win your case.