Orbitz apologizes - I appreciate it.

I am a hard sell. Once blacklisted, you're usually gone for good. An example - I haven't eaten at McDonalds for nine years - even when it's the only thing available.

Some of you may know from reading the blog of my negative experience (and subsequent boycott) with Orbitz when we were booking tickets for our honeymoon. That boycott costs any travel company quite a lot, when you consider that Jamie travels 50% of the time for work and we do tend to fly around a lot, what with me meeting him places, my own occasional work travel, visits back home etc.

Well, we were contacted by Orbitz recently and they have offered us an apology. Here it all is (long - I've only removed the rep's name and details on how to get the rebate):

Thank you for your recent correspondence regarding your experience with Orbitz. On behalf of my colleagues at Orbitz, I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience which you may have encountered.

In reading your comments, I can understand why you might be frustrated with your experience.

Please allow me to explain how this may have occurred. When you make a reservation through our site, Orbitz makes a soft charge against your account which validates the credit card and puts the money on hold. In this case, your bank provided a code to Orbitz authorizing the amount of the ticket charges. Unfortunately, the airline you chose was not available, and the soft charges should have been immediately removed from your account, since no tickets were available to complete the purchase. We believe you might have used your debit card for this transaction, since the banks of debit cards, take a little longer for the pre-authorization or, soft charges, to be removed from the account.

It is my understanding that the authorization has since been removed from your account. Although these situations are rare, Orbitz can certainly contact a bank to explain the circumstances and request removal of a soft authorization. I am sorry to learn that our agent failed to properly assist you as you had asked.

We value you as our customer and for that reason, we have taken two steps.

First, I have forwarded your e-mail to the management team at our Customer Service Center for review. We take great pride in providing professional and prompt customer service and we will immediately address why your e-mail was not properly answered.

Secondly, as a gesture of goodwill, we would like to offer you a $250 rebate on your next Orbitz.com booking. This compensation is not intended to place a value on your experience. It is meant to emphasize our commitment to you as a customer and to encourage you to continue using Orbitz for your travel needs.

Thank you for telling us where extra attention is needed. We appreciate your business and hope you will provide us with a future opportunity to fully restore your confidence in our products and services.

Mrs. Gillespie, congratulations on your upcoming Baby !

We could have solved the issue much sooner if my requests had been forwarded to a higher level initially as requested. But, I do appreciate this gesture. In light of this, I will give them another shot. We'll see how that goes first. Thank you Orbitz, I appreciate your help (and baby congrats!).