Don't Use Opodo

Should you ever be tempted using the online travel company OPODO to book your travel, my advice is don't. STEER CLEAR. Particularly, avoid the French version of Opodo. I used it - and everything that could go wrong went wrong.

* I tried using the UK Opodo online flight reservation service - but after selecting all the data and clicking through all the various selections, when I finally went to pay, Opodo UK wouldn't let me use my French Visa card. This is because the initial flight departed from UK. So much for Visa international. Like, buying stuff abroad... I thought that was the idea, no? Every other company accepts Visa, in most Western countries. Not Opodo. Opodo allows you only to use yr credit card in the card's country of origin. Maybe that saves them like 30cents per booking. And loses them dozens of potential customers every day.

* So I had to use the French Opodo service. However, when I went to pay, the service would not let me buy full travel insurance, apparently because my journey did not begin in France. (Let's hope nothing goes wrong during my vacation).

* The Opodo web service auto-selected a route in which the initial flight was scheduled to land after the connecting flight was scheduled to depart. Idiots. I had to spend time and $$ on the phone to them to correct that.

* I later discovered Opodo was using an outdated route timetable, so even after having corrected the first error, they subsequently had to contact me several days later to inform me that my corrected schedule did not in fact apply and that I needed to get a different 1st-leg-rtn flight. That would be a 5am departure time, 3hrs drive from where I would be staying. (If i had known that, I wouldn't have chosen that route, dudes).

* Someone called Aurelie from Opodo France had informed me, back when I initially called to check, that my tickets were definitely eTickets. OK.
But the airline's website said that the airline in question (Kenyan) did not issue eTickets. I called Opodo to check how my tickets could be eTickets in that case. My question to Opodo about this was greeted with exasperation by my jaded French Opodo customer services assistant. "Bien sur", she assured me, in a pained tone, "of course they are eTickets. We told you already." A few days later I received a call from someone else at Opodo telling me my paper tickets were in the post. Yes, real tickets. (Are you havin a laugh? Is he havin a laugh?)

* I received an autogenerated email from Opodo a few days later telling me my paper tickets had been delivered by the French postal service. I went to check my post box- no tickets. I waited a few more days - still no tickets. A week more. Still nothing. I checked with my local post office. No tickets were ever delivered. Time was running out. I took a deep breath and called Opodo. A gruff, insistent and rather caustic gentleman at Opodo told me that I must have been lying or forgetting, and that I must have collected my tickets from my post box and subsequently lost them (!) and that if i wanted to travel, I would have to contact the airline and pay 160Euros for re-prints of the tickets. No amount of pleading would convince them that I was not lying.

SAVE YOURSELF WHILE YOU STILL CAN - DON'T USE OPODO!