Peerless Travel

Before you give any weight to this review, have a look at all my other reviews here on Unilocal.You’ll notice several five-​star reviews, a couple of fours, threes, and twos, but (so far) no one-​star reviews. Well that all changes right now. And that’s because Peerless Travel is one of the worst companies I’ve ever worked with in my life.
Originally, I had been dealing with Jessica at Peerless, to book travel for me and my wife, Chloe, to be part of my brother’s destination wedding. I had wanted for this process to be very simple: I just wanted to pay my money to Peerless, and have them book the travel, and sit next to my wife on our flights.
Almost immediately, Jessica made a small error: She booked the airline ticket with my wife’s name spelled incorrectly (‘Cloe’ instead of ‘Chloe’). I wasn’t very bothered; I just wanted it fixed, since I’ve personally had problems with airlines and/​or customs and/​or immigration, if the passport name doesn’t precisely match the ticket name. Jessica wanted to wait until we got closer to the travel date before fixing my wife’s name. Fine, we waited. In the meantime, we proceeded to book seats for all four legs of our trip together with no problems — 23D and 23E all the way.
Months passed, and United Airlines said they made five schedule changes to the flight itinerary, the last of which was on February 15, 2014. Even after all of these schedule changes, my wife and I STILL had all of our seats together. These schedule changes didn’t affect our seat selections.
Closer to the travel date, I emailed Jessica a reminder to please fix the spelling of my wife’s name. The next morning, I received an email from Jessica, stating that she had fixed Chloe’s name. I went back to review the online itinerary, and indeed, the name was fixed! However, ALL OF OUR SEATS ON ALL OF THE FLIGHTS HAD BEEN DELETED. We now had NO SEATS FOR ANY OF THE FOUR LEGS OF THE TRIP! (When I later spoke to United Airlines on two calls that I recorded, they explained that name changes will reset all seats on an itinerary.) So, when Jessica fixed Chloe’s name, this also automatically erased all of our seats, and she didn’t notice. Fortunately, I was able to rebook the same seats for three of the flights. However, for one of the flights, there were no more seats available together; they had all been taken in the few hours that elapsed, since the name change.
With time running out, I emailed Jessica asking her to please fix our seating. Jessica said it wasn’t her fault, that contrary to what United was telling me, it wasn’t the name change that erased our seats. Rather, she said that another schedule change on April 7 (which United Airlines has no record of) had affected our seats, and that she could now only get us seats together if we paid extra money for Economy Plus; Peerless, she said, would not be paying for this.
By now, Sam, the VP, became involved. He also said that Jessica and Peerless did nothing wrong (other than the initial name error). Eventually fed up with Sam too (for, in my estimation, he was being rude, and ignoring key facts that I was pointing out to him), I asked him to provide me with his supervisor’s contact information. After ignoring my first two requests, he finally replied by telling me that he has no supervisor, so I had to dig up information for the president, Ehud, on my own.
Over the next month or so, I reached Ehud several times by phone and email; he kept telling me he’d get back to me «soon», but he never truly replied, until I sent him one final email; here is a portion of it:
«I first emailed you about this problem almost a month ago (26 days ago, to be precise). Remember, there were more than 30 of us on that trip. Starting this Monday, I will encourage all of them (plus the several hundred other Canadian business contacts that I have) to spread the word about my story involving your company, and encourage others to avoid you.»
Well, believe it or not, Ehud DID finally reply to me. Unfortunately, he upheld that his company did nothing wrong, and offered nothing for their mistakes and poor treatment. But more importantly, he wrote this:
«…I suggest that you think twice before proceeding as I am forwarding this email and other threatening emails to Sam and my response to you, to our legal council [sic]. Any evidence that you carried out on your threats will be responded with a sever [sic] legal action against you.»
So I guess that’s Peerless Travel in a nutshell:
Wanna tell people about your negative experience? Then they’re apparently going to sue you.
That being said, I encourage you, and anyone you know, to stay FAR away from this company. If you’ve also had a negative experience with them, please share it here. At the end of the day, I’d just really hate for anyone else to have to deal with the same headaches that I had to when dealing with this company.