Tickets. No, really.

Okay, phew! The skeevy discount-airfare web site did, in fact, refund 100% of my money. Today, I went to a REAL AIRLINE'S website and did a bang-up job of getting a ticket to Perth, Western Australia. This time, the price was actually below the best price I'd hoped for. So it worked out great in the end.

The dates weren't as ideal, plus I fly through Dubai, and Dubai wigs me out in a how-did-we-not-see-that-this-is-the-End-Times kind of way.

No one lives here. Nothing but the invisible desert wind howling through the empty glass towers.

I still found flights with manageable layovers, though. I'm flying out on February 25, and landing in Logan again on April 22, losing a day on the way out and gaining a day on the way back.

So: February 25, 2014. Heading to Oz.

Okay, whuuut...

So scratch that.

After booking the tickets through kayak.com, I woke up in the middle of the night last night to a notification on my phone. Apparently, Kayak booked the tickets through yet another discount-airfare site, airfare.com. Airfare.com called me and left a voicemail (at midnight!), saying the cost of my ticket had gone up "tremendously" at the "last minute," and recommending that I call or go online and cancel the tickets, unless I wanted to "pay... [ominous pause] more." They didn't even leave a phone number.

This sounds very un-legit. I poked around online and found a string of freaked-out, one-star reviews of airfare.com, rife with words like "scam," "avoid at all costs," and "kayak.com should have dropped these people long ago."

This morning, I called airfare.com's customer service. It turned out that the "tremendous" price raise was about $100.00, which on a flight to Australia is actually pretty insignificant. But I was skeeved, and I had a recording of them saying they would cancel my reservation with no penalty, so I thought it best if I just got out. I cancelled the flight, and the guy on the phone said he would honor the no-fee promise. I'll have to wait and see what the credit-card statement looks like when it comes back in the next few days. I hope to God this isn't some drawn-out battle with incompetent/malicious customer service.

Anyway. All in all, it shouldn't be a huge loss. It's on my credit card, so I can dispute the charges through my own bank as well, and the price of airfare is still the same, if not a little lower, than it was yesterday when I booked. I kind of want to wait for the refund to show up before purchasing other tickets, but either way, I'll look very closely at who's doing the booking next time.