KSL Investigators help a soon-to-be passenger get the airline tickets he paid for
Sep 7, 2021, 6:58 PM | Updated: Jun 19, 2022, 10:02 pm
FARMINGTON, Utah — Buying airfare these days, for the most part, is straightforward — click the flights you want on a travel website, pay and then get your e-tickets. But when a Farmington man got fed up with a ticket service that would only give him the runaround, he called the KSL Consumer Investigators for help.
Dal Freeman made a living designing roller coasters, but now, he feels taken for a ride after purchasing airline tickets that didn’t arrive.
“Nothing, so far. Nothing,” Freeman told us after waiting nearly two weeks for those tickets.
He wanted to go to Oregon and see his daughter and granddaughters, so he punched “Alaska Airlines” into a Google Search and landed on MyFlightSearch.com, a ticket booking service.
He paid them $455 for the tickets and thought all was well.
Then came the waiting game.
“I went for eight days,” said Freeman. “Never received any tickets.”
He said each time he called MyFlightSearch, they told him the tickets would be in his email inbox the next day.
Finally, he called Alaska Airlines directly and uh oh, they had no tickets in his name.
“So, I knew something was really fishy then,” said Freeman.
His next call was to the KSL Investigators.
When we checked with the Better Business Bureau, the F-rated MyFlightSearch had logged 519 complaints in the last three years, 160 in the past year alone.
“A lot of the complaints are verbatim,” said Rhonda Mettler of the Southern Nevada Better Business Bureau. “Been getting the run around, run around, run around.”
She told us the Vegas-based outfit actually does refund some customers.
“But there’s many that have not been resolved or addressed, so I imagine, at some point, a governing agency is going to step in,” said Mettler.
Not waiting around for that, the KSL Investigators found the guy who runs MyFlightSearch.com through Nevada’s commerce department and reached out to him directly.
We never heard back, but within hours, Freeman’s missing tickets finally appeared in his inbox.
The retired rollercoaster virtuoso said he will avoid his next wild ride by looking more closely at search results.
“I’m just a lot smart now,” said Freeman. “But this was a tricky one.”
Freeman also received a check from MyFlightSearch.com — a partial refund by way of apology.
He told us that check, well, bounced. Another reason why you can’t always trust the first search result.
The BBB’s Mettler recommends checking at least three links to help ensure you’re buying tickets from where you really want to buy them.
