An hour ago I booked a flight with gotogate.ch to which I was led by skyscanners.ch. They bilked me out of chf 146 and I'd just like to warn others not to be as foolish as me.
After going through the usual pages of details and options, unticking all those boxes, I was presented with a page showing the exact amout I was to pay and invited to enter my card details.
After my payment was accepted, the next screen came up with a much larger amount, I'd been charged an additional chf 97.72 for using a Mastercard and 39.00 for "Reiserücktrittsversicherung" which I'm certain I'd gone back to untick. At no time before payment was I warned of this extra charge, and I imagine that I probably wasn't allowed to untick Reiserücktrittsversicherung, but no warning of this either. This goes way beyond the little tricks that Easyjet and Ryanair used to play on their sites - it's plain cheating.
Is there a trade organisation in Switzerland to whom I could complain about gotogate? The site is a Swiss one and the payment was in Swiss Francs. I don't think these people should be allowed to trade.
Going back to skyscanners it does warn that some agents charge extra for credit cards, but not that the large amout will be witheld from you until after you've paid.
The lesson? use a proper travel agent, not someone on the internet you've never heard of.
If they are not responsive, filing a *fraud* claim with the credit card company (as Sbrinz mentioned) is your best bet. The credit card company is obliged to retract any claims on your card that you did not approve (some paperwork is involved). If you act quickly, your money will never leave your account.
I thought I would also share my experience booking tickets online. I use skyscanner.ch and momondo.ch to find deals, but whenever redirected to an online travel agent, I always check their reputation first on http://www.trustpilot.com/ (gotogate is very badly rated there).
It is very common for some online travel agent (travelgenio, bravofly and many others) to manipulate prices, so that they appear first on travel search engines then add extra fees (handling fee, credit card surcharge) costs once you filled in all your personal data.
Online travel agents I can recommend, well rated, very transparent and you can avoid any extra payment charge using Sofort payment:
I know that it is very annoying that airlines and online airline ticketing agents build a set of hurdles to trip one up and catch extra revenue from oneself, but I have just run a dummy booking on gotogate.ch and the reiserücktrittversicherung and credit card options were clearly shown before processing payment ( which I did not do obviously ).
However, I was of course, looking for them and thus might not have noticed had I not been doing so.
If one unclicks the reiserücktrittversicherung, as one proceeds one is asked the same question with a green tab to proceed which, if one does not pay attention, one might assume is simply confirming to go to the next step but which in fact does so but with the insurance added back in.
Before confirming the final payment, one is given the revised total which one has to accept and agree with before payment can be made. I know such sites are very misleading but I think you might have problems getting the credit card company to cancel the transaction.
The credit card and debit card charges are often rip-offs, as they are usually well over the % commission charged by the credit card companies and often are charged per person and not per transaction.
What I find also very annoying is that airlines, ( Lufthansa, BA, Air France etc ), advertise special offers such as "Europe with Lufthansa from only Euro 49.00*" and then the "*" is somewhere in miniscule writing defined as being not including taxes and other charges which usually doubles or triples the final price !
For airlines at least it is basically illegal in the EU - the price has to include all unavoidable charges. Not sure if Switzerland legally applies this but in practise the airlines appear to.
I actually find the majors to be mostly OK with this, Ryanair however turn avoiding this into an art form. Classic is that they don't charge for credit/debit cards as long as you are using a card no-one has ever heard of and that only about 2 people in the entire world actually have - leaving them free to charge everyone else pretty well what they want and not include it in the advertised fare.
The amount they charge to print your boarding card at an airport is another lovely one.
Sadly ever more are playing the avoidable game with luggage charges, unneeded travel insurance, etc. You just have to watch everything like a hawk
gotogate.ch is definitely not the only website to do this trick. It seems like most ticket booking websites work in the same way and after the first time you realize what to look for. Often tickets end up being about the same price as when booking directly with the flight company.
Swiss also do the same. Waiting until the final purchase page before you complete the transaction to announce the credit card fee. It may be legal but annoying all the same.
sky-tours.com warning : Tried a few times to book through this site, after finding them as offering the best price on an aggregator like skyscanner.com. Every time I did so, the price "mysteriously" increased as I got to the "enter payment details" step. Avoid like the plague is my advice.
cheaptickets.ch warning : Awful, awful, awful customer service. Had to call their helpline twice. The first time was a few minutes before their closing time, and they hung up on me. I had to call Singapore Airlines in Singapore to get the problem sorted out. Today they are just not answering the phone. Cheap if you just want a ticket, but if you need any help or information then forget it.
Yeah but with Swiss, it's 22.- and not almost 100.-, and you can still cancel the reservation if you really mind about the 20 bucks. The extra fee is shown before you confirm the reservation. That is OK, imo, and actually pretty standard, with many sites, providers, online shops, whatnot.
I booked a flight Basel-London on Swiss yesterday with gotogate.ch, before reading anything about them!
The negative experience by people put me quite off, but so far everything seems ok to me and I got the order confirmation by them today.
I had used the mobile website and there was no popup window trying to trick you as there was on the normal website. I also unticked all the boxes, which was also easier on the mobile site than on the normal website I tried after becoming scared, because the normal site adds everything automatically and you manually have to untick everything. It is a bit like ryanair times ten, so better be careful and check it 100 times!
I also used UBS web security payment with VISA, which leads you onto a separate website, so my credit card charge is still zero on the bill, maybe that helped? In the final order and in the confirmation, the total price was still the same as the one I agreet to on the UBS website. In any case, I will check my credit account again, just to make sure they didn't add anything.
Personally, I wouldn't use them again as there seems to be a bigger risk, but having done it once and checking SWISS (I logged in and the booking was there), so far everything went ok. I don't recommend them, but I can see that many people gave them bad reviews on review pages because they entered their name wrong or wanted to change their flights, which (obviously) had high charges, as they want you to buy the insurances beforehand for that.
I wanted to report another very bad experience with gotogate.ch.
Their "buy insurance" trick is very aggressive: pop-up asks "do you want insurance? yes/no", you choose "no", then another pop-up asks the same question with huge green "yes" and text-only "no", very easy to be mislead into thinking that the second question is "are you sure", with "correct" answers reverted.
What is more, in the very end they try to charge around 10% credit card fee without option to avoid it.
In comparison, I used cheaptickets.ch several times. I found their "buy insurance" nagging less imposing (though still present) and they offer an option to pay with online banking without additional fees.
Therefore, if, say, skyscanner reports 460 CHF from cheaptickets and 450 CHF from gotogate, chepatickets can still turn out less expensive in the end.
I have never used customer service of either, I imagine both are bad or worse.
Skyscanner should add approximate charges to these websites or should show warning. Yesterday I wanted to book a ticket. Airline was selling it for approx CHF820 and cheaptickets.ch fare was approx CHF760. I thought lets give cheaptickets.ch a try and guess what. Credit card charges were around CHF55. Final amount was almost same as the airline fare and I didn't select any insurance.
What worked for me so far to avoid surcharge with cheaptickets was choosing "sofortueberweisung" as the payment method. It makes an automatic payment using your online banking system (worked for me with Postfinance). The downside is that you need to trust the 3rd party with your online banking details.
A changeable ticket does not mean that you can change it for free (in most cases) but only that it can be changed. Some tickets are non-changeable and non-refundable.
So not knowing what kind of ticket you booked, the company may be right in charging this for the flight change.
The initial urge to save money makes us go to these sites, which have many hidden charges...On edreams, one i paid extra for no cancellation charges. Later, it turned out that it was only for waiving edreams's charges in case of cancellation. As I was issued a non refundable ticket, I ended up paying extra without any benefit
It is best to go with airline website or with US/UK based travel agents as the price in most cases is all inclusive...one may have to pay currency conversion charges though!