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Last year in looking for bargain air fare in the height of the summer season 2008 to Italy I happened to find an ebay auction entitled Trip for 2 to Europe.
I had already obtained 10 FF tickets at the 50K level for my family and SILs family, but at a nominal value of 2cents/mile plus taxes, these tickets were valued at ~$1100. The lowest I ever saw tickets all year was about $1260 using kayak.com.
Anyway, the ebay auctions had a hidden reserve which after awhile watching repeated auctions I figured out to be $1450 for two tickets East Coast to Europe in the form of AA vouchers. I bid and won enough for everyone at this price, thought I'd done quite well at ~$725/ticket, I had already researched and knew what fare bucket the vouchers came out of and determined that they were available for my dates.
In the meantime I made timeshare reservations for both parties in Florence and Rome and presented the 'bill' for air and accommodations to the SIL who then backed out as SIL didn't really have the 'approval' of her finance manager.
I had the charity foundation that had the ebay auction make my reservations which I was able to confirm through AA. The vouchers were supposed to come a few weeks prior to the trip to be exchanged for tickets.
Spring08.
RHC decided that I had too many points for the year because of a mistake they made when I combined some accounts. I could buy(rent) all the extra points they had given me for $20K or some ridiculous amount. I said no, I'll cancel some reservations. They then wanted to charge me a cancellation fee for each of the many cancellations. I said no, I didn't think so. I finally prevailed and canceled my extra Florence reservation, a bunch of summer beach reservations, and two reservations for the very next day in Brazil that I wasn't going to use (that's another horror story), it was like 200,000+ points that they had made a mistake on, OK, yes, I knew there were too many points there but I wasn't asking. (My extra Rome reservation got rented for more than the MF for all my Italy reservations.)
Summer.
The airline vouchers didn't come and didn't come, foundation said that they were running behind and would take care of it electronically saving me the $30 ticketing fees. We're down to 48 hours prior to the trip and still no tickets. Calls to the foundation only got recordings and email was returned saying they were working on it... The day before the trip I checked the Rec Loc # with AA for my name and it finally showed as ticketed, whew, I didn't bother to check all the names on the reservation.
Got to the airport ticket counter two hours prior to departure for first leg DC-NYC. All was fine until they got down to the last member of the party (all on same locator/reservation) and the agent said that the last person wasn't ticketed. It took a full hour blocking the ticket counter to get them to straighten it out. Agent kept trying to get our bags checked and I refused saying we weren't going if all the members of the party weren't going. Agent finally determined that ticketing fees had been collected for everyone; but the last member had not been ticketed. He finally went back into the back office where the person that took the transaction/vouchers by hand directly from the foundation person the day before was again on duty, whew.
While in Europe, I get a blanket email from the foundation saying that sorry, if your trip starts anytime after 16Jul08 you no longer have vouchers coming, they have had a problem with their eBay Store contractor (I suspect embezzlement). I guess I was extremely lucky that my trip started in June but I've still got all these extra vouchers for trips to Europe thanks to my SIL. The email goes on to say that you should file a claim for the eBay auction with the foundation, if your trip was 16Jul or after you could still use your reservation but you'd have to pay the airline the prevailing rate! I put in my claim.
I finally got my refund last week. So, I'm not out for SILs timeshare or tickets but I'm never buying their tickets again. More - somewhere in here SIL and her financier ask me to get them reservations to Cancun in Summer08 during same time they were supposed to be in Italy with us.
I had already obtained 10 FF tickets at the 50K level for my family and SILs family, but at a nominal value of 2cents/mile plus taxes, these tickets were valued at ~$1100. The lowest I ever saw tickets all year was about $1260 using kayak.com.
Anyway, the ebay auctions had a hidden reserve which after awhile watching repeated auctions I figured out to be $1450 for two tickets East Coast to Europe in the form of AA vouchers. I bid and won enough for everyone at this price, thought I'd done quite well at ~$725/ticket, I had already researched and knew what fare bucket the vouchers came out of and determined that they were available for my dates.
In the meantime I made timeshare reservations for both parties in Florence and Rome and presented the 'bill' for air and accommodations to the SIL who then backed out as SIL didn't really have the 'approval' of her finance manager.
I had the charity foundation that had the ebay auction make my reservations which I was able to confirm through AA. The vouchers were supposed to come a few weeks prior to the trip to be exchanged for tickets.
Spring08.
RHC decided that I had too many points for the year because of a mistake they made when I combined some accounts. I could buy(rent) all the extra points they had given me for $20K or some ridiculous amount. I said no, I'll cancel some reservations. They then wanted to charge me a cancellation fee for each of the many cancellations. I said no, I didn't think so. I finally prevailed and canceled my extra Florence reservation, a bunch of summer beach reservations, and two reservations for the very next day in Brazil that I wasn't going to use (that's another horror story), it was like 200,000+ points that they had made a mistake on, OK, yes, I knew there were too many points there but I wasn't asking. (My extra Rome reservation got rented for more than the MF for all my Italy reservations.)
Summer.
The airline vouchers didn't come and didn't come, foundation said that they were running behind and would take care of it electronically saving me the $30 ticketing fees. We're down to 48 hours prior to the trip and still no tickets. Calls to the foundation only got recordings and email was returned saying they were working on it... The day before the trip I checked the Rec Loc # with AA for my name and it finally showed as ticketed, whew, I didn't bother to check all the names on the reservation.
Got to the airport ticket counter two hours prior to departure for first leg DC-NYC. All was fine until they got down to the last member of the party (all on same locator/reservation) and the agent said that the last person wasn't ticketed. It took a full hour blocking the ticket counter to get them to straighten it out. Agent kept trying to get our bags checked and I refused saying we weren't going if all the members of the party weren't going. Agent finally determined that ticketing fees had been collected for everyone; but the last member had not been ticketed. He finally went back into the back office where the person that took the transaction/vouchers by hand directly from the foundation person the day before was again on duty, whew.
While in Europe, I get a blanket email from the foundation saying that sorry, if your trip starts anytime after 16Jul08 you no longer have vouchers coming, they have had a problem with their eBay Store contractor (I suspect embezzlement). I guess I was extremely lucky that my trip started in June but I've still got all these extra vouchers for trips to Europe thanks to my SIL. The email goes on to say that you should file a claim for the eBay auction with the foundation, if your trip was 16Jul or after you could still use your reservation but you'd have to pay the airline the prevailing rate! I put in my claim.
I finally got my refund last week. So, I'm not out for SILs timeshare or tickets but I'm never buying their tickets again. More - somewhere in here SIL and her financier ask me to get them reservations to Cancun in Summer08 during same time they were supposed to be in Italy with us
.
Glad you can recover RHC and eBay.
okay...we don't do that anymore! 
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