veronika l.

I recently booked my ticket with via.com after Skyscanner recommended them on their website. Little did I know I was entering 2 nightmares - dealing with via.com and dealing with Neil and Anastasja from Skyscanner's customer support who before even reading my email decided to side with their "travel agent".

Here's the story. Via.com auto-filled my passport issuer with the country I was booking the tickets from. This has been confirmed by Skyscanners support Anastasja when she tried to prove I am wrong here. Somehow she still managed to victim blame me for this mistake. As a digital nomad of 10 years, I booked hundreds of flights, and never ever did I make any mistake, up until now as the field was auto-filled and easy to overlook.

Just before I hit pay, I noticed a price change at the last minute, also not very obvious to people. But after trying to book with airlines whose website kept freezing I decided to pay the extra charge just to get this sorted.

Via.com didn't send a transactional email but a personal email with my ticket. All this started to be super suspicious and this is when I decided to cancel the ticket and get a refund so I could book with a trustworthy provider.

I booked these tickets with a company card that I haven't used in months and only used twice before. Within an hour of booking with Via.com I started to receive emails to authorize the payments that I hadn't made. Clearly, these phishing attempts were coming from Via.com. I brought this up with Skyscanner too.

Skyscanner didn't listen at all, I spent a week talking to Neil who ignored all my concerns and ignored my wish to cancel the flights. Neil decided I was in the wrong and only believed Via.com. He thought Via.com tried to fix my wrong nationality on the ticket and that's my only problem here. Completely disregarding the rest. I asked to speak to his supervisor and here is where entitled Anatasja comes in. Not a supervisor by her email signature so clearly just a try to get rid of me by another basic worker. No further communication from them, possibly because I was 7 days before the travel, had to buy another ticket as the first one still had wrong details on it, spent a whole week dealing with this and ultimately, lost my temper on the incompetency and lack of empathy from Skyscanner.

Beware of who you choose to book with. I 100% trusted Skyscanner wouldn't work with scammers but here they are, not caring at all for the people losing their money because their greed.

Do not give them your bank details! After purchasing my tickets I was notified about several unauthorized attempts to pay with my card. I haven't used that card in months and the fraudulent attempts started within an hour after purchasing my tickets.

Besides, they booked my ticket with the wrong information I never filled in when booking, so the ticket is useless to me.

Plus they add an extra charge on top of the price of the ticket just before you hit Pay, you may not even notice it so you overpay and just get tons of problems instead of a holiday.