Did Hawaiian Airlines try to pull a “fast one” On their website?
Hawaiian Airlines announced today, that just a few days after they started to add their insurance waiver to each of their bookings without notifying customers, they stopped the program. They claim that they didn’t get any complaints from customers but that’s kind of hard to believe. It’s also hard to believe that they could make a decision to do this prematurely, blaming it on poor execution and lack of communication. Hawaiian Airlines is a pretty nice sized bureaucracy and things don’t happen in a vacuum, especially in their online division. It’s interesting to note that their engine is supplied and developed by the same folks over at Panda Travel who owns Get2Hawaii.net, the technology company behind Hawaiian Air Online. This is a huge local travel agency who’s been closely affiliated with Hawaiian Airlines practically since the beginning of its existence. This sweetheart relationship between these two companies have led to a spin off of several affiliate sites all which are run really by the same company however, travel agents pay them a yearly fee for their booking engine. if you’re shopping around on the Internet you know what I’m talking about. There are tons of these cookie-cutter online websites for Hawaii which all have the same exact looking booking engine and the prices are all the same. None of these affiliate sites had the extra insurance automatically added so that makes me think that they knew exactly what they were doing when they started to add the insurance without allowing the customers to choose for themselves.
The situation here with Hawaiian Airlines online portal is just another reason why it’s important to use a travel agent to book Hawaii, preferable an agency here in Hawaii like us. We will protect you and make sure that you know exactly what you’re purchasing because you’re speaking to a human being who lives here and works here in Hawaii. We always make sure that our customers are aware of what they’re getting and what they’re not getting and our prices 90% of the time are cheaper than the online portals.
2 comments May 15th, 2008
