Inefficent, unhelpful

Several months ago, I booked two seats from upstate New York to Spain on Expedia and made my seat selections online. The flights were on US Airways and Iberia.

During the next few months, I received emails from Expedia updating me about changes in the times of some of the flights but saying everything else was in order. Then, the day before our flights, we checked in online only to find that there was no seat allocated to my husband on the US Airways flight. On calling US Airways, we were told Expedia had only put in a request for one seat.

I tried to remedy this by calling Expedia Customer Service and after long waits and three tries got through to someone who could not figure out what I was trying to say in spite of my repeating it in several different ways. Each time, the person would put me on hold and then start from scratch and get the entire itinerary wrong. Eventually, I just had to hang up.

US Airways was helpful but couldn't get my husband and myself two seats together on their trans-Atlantic flights and we had to pay extra to get the "choice" seats. This was not a voluntary upgrade!

I have explained this in writing to Expedia, asking to be reimbursed for the extra expense and every time I get the same, rote, message that allocating the seats is the airline's job and it is not responsible for anything. A month and a half of trying to get through the agents has brought pretty much the same standard response, with two emails from "Tier 3 Customer Service" telling me the same thing but in a more elaborate fashion.

AB