airtrainer wrote:If you don't change your plans by yourself, KL will fix that for you
I'm sure they will
My attempt of talking to them about the core of the problem resulted in a nice compensation (almost 90% of the ticket price), but no human interaction that would have allowed me to help them understand why their online booking process and customer communication policy is heavily flawed.
And it still is, as my booking to JFK in January showed:
KLM's website offered me a rt fare in J of some €1450 - that's a steal, gimme!
Only I couldn't book it - when entering the payment details, "an error occurred". Same when I tried to book Y for €500 (€660 with Y+ seats all the way).
The problem, once again - KLM's website, when accessed directly, force-redirects me to their German website, and that one clearly has a sync problem with KLM's ticketing database.
So I went to SwooDoo.com, searched for my desired flight option, clicked "book directly with the airline", let SwooDoo redirect me to KLM.com (which right now is the only way I know to stop KLM from redirecting me to their German website), and booked the same Y flight for €320 (€480 with Y+ seats all the way).
I would still have booked J, but SwooDoo only showed a €2200 fare for that.
So instead of paying KLM some €660 for Y+ (or €1450 for J), they now got €480 minus whatever they have to pay SwooDoo for redirecting me to KLM.com. Which I didn't even do to save money, but because it's the only way for me to complete my booking on KLM.com.
Pretty stupid, huh?
But as it's impossible to tell that to the service bots, and no human being at KLM wants to talk to me about this, I guess I'll have to keep using 3rd party websites to redirect me to the cheapest-ass fares, and then claim compensations nearing or exceeding the ticket price whenever KLM screws up.
For the LAX hiccup, they paid me over €800 in total. I would have happily accepted less than half of that if they had contacted me inforehand and offered a hotel plus some goodies if I agreed to get bumped on a flight a day later.
So don't blame me for being cheap, KLM - I tried to give you my money, but you didn't want it.
Still love them for their cabin crews, though.
/offtopic
Ideology: The mistaken belief that your beliefs are neither beliefs nor mistaken.