Esky rip off

eskyripoff

Hello
How I wish I had never heard of esky! 
My 80 year old Mum booked flights on Sunday for four passengers including myself. Outward flight with easyJet, inward flight with Ryanair.  Total cost £1200. The confirmation and eticket came through almost immediately. She forwarded these to me straight away and I could see that she had accidentally booked the return trip for the same day as the outward instead of a week later. We could see that Ryanair offers free changes to customers (presuming in this case eSky is the customer) within 24 hours on flight errors, and that eSky charges just shy of £23 per passenger to make the change. 

She signed into eSky but couldnt get the flight changes system to work so completed a general enquiry form with the details. They emailed back asking for an extra £400, which she paid. However, the payment wasnt taken and no new eticket arrived. She contacted them again. This time they wanted £200-ish, which she paid, but still no payment taken and no new eticket. Confusing and panicking she contacted them again. Again they wanted £200-ish, not the exact same amount but similiar, which she paid. Then confirmation and eticket came through, and £800 was taken from her credit card. 

This cant possibly be right. Anyone got any ideas what on earth we can do? 

eskyripoff

Just to add, the difference in the flight costs between the two flights was around £50. So we expected a charge of somewhere around £240 in total. 

bagand96

Perhaps every time she contacted them they treated it as a new service request and charged the admin fees to you’ve paid 3 lots?

When booking low cost airlines only ever book with the airlines direct. 

eskbanker

eskyripoff said:

My 80 year old Mum booked flights on Sunday for four passengers including myself.

[...]

she had accidentally booked the return trip for the same day as the outward instead of a week later

[...]

She signed into eSky but couldnt get the flight changes system to work so completed a general enquiry form with the details. They emailed back asking for an extra £400, which she paid. However, the payment wasnt taken and no new eticket arrived. She contacted them again. This time they wanted £200-ish, which she paid, but still no payment taken and no new eticket. Confusing and panicking she contacted them again. Again they wanted £200-ish, not the exact same amount but similiar, which she paid. Then confirmation and eticket came through, and £800 was taken from her credit card. 

This cant possibly be right. Anyone got any ideas what on earth we can do? 

Sounds like it would be worth logging a complaint with them, with a potential fallback option of pursuing a chargeback via her card provider for the payment transactions that didn't result in revised tickets being issued.

And perhaps more relevant to future situations rather than this one but if an 80 year old struggles with this sort of thing, wouldn't it have been better for one of the other passengers to handle the booking?

dresdendave

bagand96 said:

When booking low cost airlines only ever book with the airlines direct. 

Seconded. In fact I would recommend booking direct with any airline but in particular budget ones.

eskyripoff

We thought she was going to wait for one of us to be there with her...but thanks folks. We are going to approach the credit card company to see if we can get the first two payments back. Will let you know! 

bagand96

eskyripoff said:

We thought she was going to wait for one of us to be there with her...but thanks folks. We are going to approach the credit card company to see if we can get the first two payments back. Will let you know! 

If you haven't already it will be worth trying to get invoices or similar from esky to work out exactly what has been paid and what exactly for. 

CKhalvashi

dresdendave said:

bagand96 said:

When booking low cost airlines only ever book with the airlines direct. 

Seconded. In fact I would recommend booking direct with any airline but in particular budget ones.

Depends if you can get deals. Some carriers offer heavily discounted fares to those under 30 for example which only are available through agents. We have access to significantly discounted flights on a few smaller airlines for agents selling certain other services for more specialist destinations also.

I second this though in general, as especially with flight only, these deals can be hard to find except in the first case above, and definitely with Ryanair.