I booked my flight through Expedia.com for my business trip to UK.
I use Expedia.com often because I can find reasonably cheap tickets and their UI isn’t so cheesy.
But I am NEVER going to use Expedia again after my horrible experience this time! Here are the reasons.
ONE. Watch out for the suspicious credit card transactions if you ever made cancellation
When I booked the flight, I cancelled 2 times before I actually booked my flight.
It says if you make the cancellation within 24 hours, there is no cancellation fee.
That’s why I cancelled the flight and when I made the cancellation, it all looked fine… until I got my credit card bill one month later…
It was my company credit card and there were 3 transactions that I was not aware of. Two 179 USD and one 88 USD.
Merchant name was “TRAVEL RESERVATION US” and the location was “BELLEVUE, WA”.
I googled it and it seems that there are others who had similar problem and the transactions seem to be by Expedia.
So I sent an email through Expedia.com but no response for more than 24 hours.
I was getting irritated.
I ended up calling the support. This leads to my second reason for not using Expedia anymore.
Anyway, the unknown transactions were travel protection plan I added when I booked the flight.
I normally don’t add such option for my personal use. But since it was for business, I added the plan.
Apparently, the first 2 booking I cancelled didn’t automatically cancel the protection plan together.
Did I see the option of cancelling those when I was cancelling? NO!
You can cancel booking with just one click. They made it so easy so that you might even miss to tick a checkbox somewhere in the screen.
I’m usually careful when I make cancellation but I do not recall seeing any explanation about cancelling protection plan together. That amount is never included in the total amount.
I had to spend 15 minutes on the international call to wait for the operator to look for my information and pretend to talk to her supervisor to give me refund.
But she didn’t seem to make much problem out of it.
So I assume that Expedia get such inquiry a lot and know the procedure.
I’m sure that’s how they make money too. 
Now I’m even suspicious about their feature of cancelling for free if within 24 hours.
Maybe they are doing it on purpose to make you easily cancel the flight and forget about extra plan you added to your trip so that they can rip you off.
If this was my personal account, I wouldn’t have noticed because I don’t check each transaction for all my bills. 179 USD or 88 USD is not a lot of amount so it’s easily unnoticeable.
They will refund the amount. But I had to use international call and waste my time trying to figure out this whole dumb situation.
The operator asked me at the end “Have I solved all your problem today?”
I hate such automatic, machine like response…
Your company is the one that caused this problem from the first place…
I was really pissed… 
TWO. The feature that redirects to your local site SUCKS!
You know that annoying feature of automatically redirecting to your local site even though you want to stay on Expedia.com?? That feature really sucks…
Even if I logged into .com site, I’m redirected to the local site before I even realize it.
It seems that they are all consolidated because you stay logged in even if the site changes.
I called up the number I was directed in the support page. It was surprisingly Tokyo number.
The site was still in English and I was looking at my itinerary so I didn’t realize I had been redirected to .co.jp site.
After I’ve waited for a while to be connected to an operator, I explained the situation to the operator.
He got my information, listened to my story, and asked me, “Is the transaction in USD?”
I answered, “YES”
He said, “Oh, I’m sorry. If the transaction is in USD, it is through Expedia.com. We cannot handle it.”
You didn’t notice the booking was done through .com until now??
He said as if Expedia.com was a different company that he has nothing to do with it.
It’s your stupid company that automatically redirected to Japanese site even though I logged into the US site and this is the number I was directed to!
“Do you mean I have to look up the number myself?”
“Hold on. Let me look for the number.”
After I asked him, I was able to get the number which was US local number.
THREE. Online receipt doesn’t include the protection plan amount
If the receipt had shown the protection plan amount, I would have noticed this situation earlier.
You can print the receipt from your itinerary page.
This was for business trip so I have to submit receipt to the company.
So I printed out the receipt from the itinerary page.
And the receipt only shows the flight ticket amount and protection plan amount is not included. You would expect all amount is included in the receipt because it’s one package.
I asked the operator if it is possible to get a receipt for the protection plan.
She said they don’t have one and I can print out my entire itinerary where the protection plan amount is shown.
That wasn’t my point.
What’s the point of printing out the receipt if it doesn’t include the entire amount?
Is Expedia really trying every possible way to rip you off this protection plan amount?
I think so.
But also I think that this is something that they added on to their existing system, probably for a different insurance company, that it’s not integrated seamlessly.
It makes the user experience really suck.
In conclusion, I am never going to use Expedia again.
Expedia! You have just lost one customer and possibly more customers that may agree with me reading this blog.
Bye bye, Expedia.
Okami