And the online travel agency with the most complaints is …

Expedia. That’s according to a survey of my authoritative email “in” box, which contains seven years of complaint data from travelers. Coming in second? Travelocity, followed by Orbitz.

Alright, my methods may not be completely scientific (after all, my email contains all of my correspondence, not just complaints) but it’s a pretty good indicator.

Let’s start with Expedia.

Notice the steady rise in complaints? Could just be that more people are complaining to me, of course.

Here’s Travelocity.

Notice the trend line, which is almost identical.

And here’s Orbitz.

Again, the curve is almost the same.

Put it all together, and here’s what it looks like. Orbitz is blue, Travelocity is red and Expedia is orange.

So which agency gets the most complaints? The raw numbers (inexact as they are, admittedly) must be weighted, as several of the commenters have pointed out.

A few hours after this post appeared, Expedia contacted me to say it had crunched my numbers based on market share data provided by my good friends at PhoCusWright. How nice of them!

These are the conversations per market share point.

1. Travelocity 26.1
2. Orbitz 20
3. Expedia 16.2

According to Expedia,

You can see that Expedia scores the best not worst. In fact, Travelocity has 61 percent more complaints per percentage of market share than we do. So, based on the volume of email conversations you’ve had by brand, a customer that books with Expedia would be far less likely to bring you a complaint compared to customers that book with the two OTAs.

(Photo: Life art/Flickr Creative Commons)

  • Bryan

    All the more reason why I don’t use these websites.

  • http://Interesting,but.... Pauline Frommer

    Chris, as you note at the very bottom Expedia is largest. Wouldn’t it make sense that the agency that handles the most travel would have the most complaints? And that, as you’ve gotten better known as an ombudsman, you’d be getting more complaint letters about, well, everything?

    I think this is a very valid topic to study, but I have trouble taking this chart seriously. Is there any way to weight your results based on the relative sizes of these three companies? That might make for a more fair comparison.

  • Christopher Elliott

    @Pauline, guilty as charged! I’ve been writing the ombudsman column since ’99, but storing emails in the cloud since ’04, which accounts for the smaller numbers. Regarding balancing, that would require someone with a little knowledge of statistics. But that person is not me. As I said in yesterday’s post about my “in” box queries, these numbers are journalistically questionable yet highly entertaining.

  • Carver

    Chris

    Why don’t you simply normalize the chart to reflect the various sizes, say complaints per 1000 tickets sold or something like that?

  • Brian C

    Just one more reason I don’t book on these sites. I will often go to them and find fare deals but I will book at the individual carrier’s website. It’s just easier and I often save a couple bucks. Not to mention these sites don’t aggregate all airlines. You often have to search sites like Southwest outside if your Expedia or Travelocity search.

    Hotels on these sites are mostly hit or miss for me. I don’t like the idea of paying for my hotel up front. I want the cancelation flexibility so I don’t mind paying a little more (it’s cheap and virtually GUARANTEED insurance if I don’t make my flight or need to cancel ahead of time) and the most out of pocket is usually one night and NOT my entire stay.

    The other reason is the opaque hotel system. I’m far too picky to stay at a random hotel and prefer to pay a little extra to get my preferred property.

  • Brian\PVD

    After using travelocity to book a hotel and flight “package” to Paris, I’ve learned my lesson. I found out the hard way that they farm out international reservations to another online company, which in turn accesses the hotel’s reservations system. Computers failing to talk to each other resulted in a 50 Euro additional charge, and an insistence on check out that I had not pre-paid for the hotel.

    I learned my lesson and will book directly with any smaller hotels from now on.

  • http://travelsitecritic.com/reviews Pam

    Interesting. I have done some “non-scientific” research on this subject as myself. Judging by the amount of complaints that Expedia receives on my website (Travel Site Critic) compared to their competitors, it does seem that Expedia has the most complaints. Of course, it’s hard to judge when you need to take into account the number of people who have good experiences and don’t talk about it. Most people who are happy with the service are not going to run out and look for websites to share it with the world…. but when people are mad they do!!

  • frostysnowman

    I use these websites for research only, then book directly with airlines and hotels. I think that’s what they are best for. They will usually honor the Expedia/Travelocity/Orbitz rates. I’ve never bought a plane ticket or made a hotel reservation directly through any travel site.

  • http://www.talestoldfromtheroad.com Dick Jordan

    I agree. Use these 3rd-party sites for research, then book direct with the travel service provider. If something goes awry, at least there will be one less finger trying to point the blame at someone else.

  • Steve

    I will say that while the number of complaints regarding online travel agencies has made me think twice about using them in the future, my only experience with Expedia was a great one. We stayed three nights at NYNY in Las Vegas on an Expedia special where after paying for two nights, the third night was free…and the third night was the most expensive of the three. Before booking, I looked on NYNY’s website and they had no similar specials. We saved almost $150 by using Expedia compared to booking directly with the hotel; to me, that kind of savings on a three-night hotel stay is well worth the risk of something going wrong. But nothing did – the reservation was as expected and the hotel even let us check in early when we arrived.

    I don’t think I’d ever use an online agency for airfares because they never seem to be cheaper than the airlines themselves. Why introduce another layer of complexity if you’re not saving money in return?

  • http://www.travelocity.com Joel

    Hi Brian/PVD. Joel from Travelocity here. I’m sorry you had a bad experience with. If you’d like to share anything else, please email me with your Trip ID. We’d like to see where the breakdown occurred. Thank you.

  • Chris

    I’m surprised that there were so many issues. I have only used Travelocity once and had no issues at all. However, reading this makes me leery about doing it again!

  • http://www.facebook.com/philip.brown.12576 Philip Brown

    In my association with attorneys; I would have to say that “If you pay them enough, they will inform & create charts that “prove” the sky is purple”!!! As far as my comments on Travelocity (who get my vote for #1), please see the forum on Code-sharing.
    Muchas gracias,
    Philip C. Brown
    philipc4u59@yahoo.com