It has been quite a stressful week. I have gone to the Chinese embassy three times and still don’t have a visa – Monday it was closed (who knew the masses still celebrate May Day?), Tuesday the line was out the door and up the street so I chickened out. Took Wed off because it was pouring and I am not going to stand in the rain for two hours for nothin. Today, I finally made it inside with all my carefully prepared documents – passports, photos, applications (nowhere, of course, do I mention our plans to visit Tibet, or the fact that Vincent is a photographer). After standing in line for two hours, the @%# lovely lady behind the counter took one glance at my stack of papers and shoved them back at me saying “color!, only color photos”. So I had to crawl away with my apparently completely unworthy black and white visa photos. When I asked her to at least look and see if everything else was in order so I would not have any more surprises tomorrow she refused saying “I don’t know, my supervisor might not like something”. Another woman at the counter was literally crying, she had been sent around to so many different windows so many times.
But that was nothing on the woman from the STA travel agency. Remember STA – Student Travel Agency – it’s been around since I was a teenager needing my first fake ID so you would think they must know what they are doing, right? Their office happens to be two blocks away from my apartment and I have dropped in maybe three times to talk about our trip and tickets with a supposedly sane sales agent there. She kept going on about the value of having this agency behind you – if something went wrong you could just call up an actual live person and they could fix it (someone actually called while I was sitting there who had slept through the once a week flight out of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). Well, I finally nail down our itinerary, know our dates for at least the first 3 or 4 flights and am ready to bite the bullet and Purchase Tickets. So I spend a while on Kayak.com, figure out some routes I want, see their prices then trot along to STA to reap the great reward of their decades of experience, figuring they will at least match the price if not do much better and then there is all the security of having them there to help little ole me. She takes my list of flights and says she will get back to me.
When she finally does, the next day – her solution is nothing but the exact same routes I had found but costing significantly more, and oh, she forgot to mention the $30 per person booking fee. After I send her an email saying I might only buy one of the tickets with them (the only leg that was the same price as the one I sourced) I then find out that these “discounted” prices are contingent on my buying their travel insurance, otherwise each of those tickets actually costs $100 more per person (and the booking fee). OK, I’ve looked at travel insurance and had almost decided to go with one but wanted to see what STA had to offer. If it was really cheaper it might be worth the extra ticket costs. Um, no, her quote for travel insurance is over $4,000, literally four times the cost of the other insurance. Seriously? I would spend $4,000 to get tickets that are more expensive than the ones I brought to her? I zoom back onto Kayak.com only to find out that the prices I had found two days ago are now gone, some legs are at $300 -$400 more a ticket. So this person not only completely wasted my time but now has lost me serious money (talking tickets for 5 people here).
The moral of the story is – wait for it – Do It Yourself. I finally, with a lot of searching and re-jiggering of flight times, found a ticket that was about the same price as the original one I had wanted and over $1,000 less than the one she “found” for me.
Sigh, but at the end of the day – we’re going to Borneo! It’s done. We are leaving NYC on July 26th and arriving in Kota Kinabalu two days later (with a stopover in Hong Kong)! And from now on I definitely won’t be going to any more travel agencies! But I will be sure to set my alarm clock on travel days….
momofour