A textbook service failure, handled with rudeness and zero accountability
I booked a flight to Reykjavík through Booking.com. The airline cancelled the flight on 16 June, 2 weeks before the departure! I was never informed. The app kept showing the booking as CONFIRMED, so I travelled to the airport for a flight that had not existed for 2 weeks. Only once things went wrong did I discover that the booking was actually handled behind the scenes by a partner agency, Gotogate, something I was never clearly aware of when I paid. At the airport the airline could not help me because the booking came through this agent, and pointed me back to them. Support then sent me through a chain of call-centre agents, dropped calls, and repeated procedures, before escalating me to a supposedly specialised team for cases like this. That “specialised” agent refused any assistance, offered no alternative, and kept repeating it was the airline’s problem. Nobody took responsibility. Two failures stand out. First, the systems are siloed: my passenger details were apparently never passed to the airline, which is why I received no cancellation notice. Second, and worse, the human touchpoint was appalling. The agent was rude and intimidating, completely unable to manage an obvious service failure, and in the end closed the chat himself without offering a single solution. I was ultimately rebooked by the airline directly, not by the agent I had actually paid. Their only contribution to a crisis they caused was to waste my time, pass me around, and intimidate me. I was left to fund an airport hotel and transfers myself. Booking through a big-name platform bought me precisely nothing when it mattered. Avoid unless you are comfortable being abandoned the moment something goes wrong.