Recently I was unfortunate enough to find myself trying to buy airline tickets online. As usual, it was an awful experience. This time happened to be the worst ever though, it was terrible.

Priceline gave me some excellent prices, so I tried to buy. Error error error, sorry, too bad. I went back and tried again. The offer I just tried was now gone, but several others of the same price were there.

I went through this same procedure about 4 times, finally with the last one I got a different error message. I was emailed a customer support number, so I called it to find out that the last deal didn’t go through either. Sorry, tough luck, we just put those really cheap prices up there to mess with your head.

Poozer slackers.

Then I went Sidestep (I’m not giving any of these outfits the dignity of a link) where I found some more smokin’ deals. Now near as I can figure, Sidestep finds you a deal then forwards you to the airline or the site with the deal and you buy it there. So I clicked through the dirt-cheap tickets they told me I could get, only to find that the price was $111 more than Sidestep said it was.

Not impressed. What a bunch of raging incompetence and deception.