Day 26, 2016.08.03 Kyakhta

Already yesterday it was impossible to get an agent of our travel agency on the phone just robots and queue. I definitely can’t recommend “Seat24” So I tried my luck with the flight company. I got the information that we can leave on 9th or 20th with extra costs of 900€ or 700€. But the change is just possible via the travel agency Seat24. Annoyed I sent another email with the request of calling me back. In parallel we checked cheaper flight options and found them. The confusion on the booking is a result of the different plans of the group members. Seat24 offers a flexible booking which we thought offers a good compromise for the different time schedules with its uncertainties. After checking everything we realized that we paid Seat24 almost the flight companies penalty for changing the booking even if we haven’t used it and are fixed to the flight company and the destinations of the initial booking. After knowing all this it was the most stupid of all options but at least Seat24 makes good money with that trick. We also got the information that we’ll not see any money if we cancel the flight because we already used the ticket once to fly there. So we choose to upgrade our tickets at least it was just 600€ now via Seat24 instead of the 900€ of the flight company. The remaining cheaper flights were going via China and saved just 100€ but took much more time. When we wanted to pay it got annoying again. So I sent a little bit more aggressive mail that they should call me because I will not deal with their robots and queues when I pay 5€ per minute because of roaming.