Staff! A UK travel agency has our $3,891 and we want it back.

Dear Stumbled,

In August 2020, we booked a trip to Iceland for $3,891 through Jetline Vacations, a deal we found through the email offers we signed up to receive through Travelzoo. Shortly after, Iceland was closed to foreign visitors, so we contacted Jetline to get our money back. We didn’t hear from them for weeks and finally filed a dispute with our credit card company. That seemed to shock them, because then Jetline came back: they were going to give us credit for two years. We ended up booking a trip to Portugal for April 2022 but were concerned when Jetline didn’t send us confirmation details. We complained, waited weeks for a response, and were finally told we owed $800 dollars due to a rate increase. We refused to pay until we checked the documents, but when we got them, the flight we were on had already been cancelled. We informed Jetline, tried to book a third trip and ran into similar problems. We want our money back! Can you help? Meghan and Jay, Clifton, Va.

Dear Meghan and Jay,

The entire travel industry has been rocked by the pandemic, so that’s understandable beamline, a London-based travel agency with a strong online presence, would ignore your requests until your credit card company stepped in and then refuse a refund, booking you another package instead, later raising the price and ignoring you for months. Just kidding! This sounds awful.

I contacted Jetline, which also goes by the more British name of Jetline Holidays. Finally, I spoke to the Chief of Operations, Richard Levy. He refunded your money and asked me to offer you a $200 credit for your next trip. (Update: You declined in the strongest possible terms.)

“The most important thing is to make sure the customer is happy, and I’m so sorry,” he said on a phone call shortly after reading your account, which I forwarded to the company. ‘Do you know when your blood starts to boil? I thought, ‘Why didn’t someone just nip this in the bud ages ago and keep a happy customer?’” He told me his customer service had made a few mistakes and needed some retraining.

To be fair, he called me back later with compelling evidence that your story contains inaccuracies. For example, he emailed me internal records showing that Jetline promptly sent you reservation information, including the documentation for your flights and hotels, after you booked the trip to Portugal. You later confirmed this.

However, your story of a turnaround in Jetline’s customer service is accurate. My own blood had been boiling for five days trying to get answers from them before finally reaching Mr. Levy. First, the website doesn’t list a customer service email address, so I called their London number and told a customer service representative named “Trevor” – a pseudonym, he confirmed – that I was a reporter. He told me he couldn’t take calls from “lawyers” and instructed me to send an email to an address he gave over the phone. I did, by CC’ing some of the employees you’d interacted with in the documentation you sent me, including a manager named Rose.

Rose responded, writing that Jetline had made “diligent efforts to rebook the customer’s travel” and continued: “Unfortunately, it appears that the customer has expressed reluctance to pay the price difference, despite our policy requiring customers to pay any additional costs, we understand their concerns and are committed to finding a mutually beneficial solution.” Her claim that the reservations manager had contacted you “several times” contradicted your account, so I wrote with some additional questions, cc’ing to Steven Roberts, the company’s general manager.

When that and a follow-up email went unanswered, I found another number for Jetline, posted online by a dissatisfied customer who eventually got a refund. That led me to two more customer service agents, a lot of time on hold, and finally a third number that put me through to someone who eventually passed me on to Mr. Levy.

In that first conversation, Mr. Levy told me he had just seen my original email. It had taken five days to get to him, and even that needed some help – van Travelzoo.

Travelzoo is an intermediary that vets travel offers and then posts them on its website and sends them to their members in promotional emails. (Companies pay to include their listings.)

I had been writing to Travelzoo since you said you heard about the package tour there, and Rhea Saran, the company’s global head of brand and content, quickly got back to me. She noted (as you told me) that you complained to Travelzoo back in February. At the time, she added, Travelzoo had contacted Jetline and was told the matter was being resolved. But this time she said a Travelzoo colleague contacted Mr Roberts directly, and that’s when the complaint got some attention. We compared notes and it turns out that Travelzoo’s contact with Jetline lasted less than an hour before I spoke to Mr. Levy. “Learning that a resolution has still not been found,” Ms. Saran wrote, “we’re glad we were able to jump back in to help push it toward a positive resolution.”

Problem solved. But the question is, as so often in these columns, was your experience a one-off, or should Jetline be avoided, despite its attractively priced packages to Europe and beyond?

Ms. Saran said Travelzoo is behind Jetline. “We have not received many complaints from members about them compared to other travel companies,” she wrote. “On the other hand, we also received feedback from many members who were satisfied with the trips booked through them.”

But as you yourself noticed, many complaints about Jetline show up in online reviews, both old And newas well as in some bad press coverage of them during the pandemic. It’s hard to know how much stock to put into this – despite my snark things were chaotic in 2020 and 2021 – and Jetline is doing much better on Trust pilotone of the sites that Travelzoo monitors to evaluate the packages it promotes.

Which brings us back to a constant theme in this column: the thorny issue of intermediaries. Unless they offer a clear advantage, the advice is to book travel services directly through airlines, hotels and car rental companies. This exercise may take a little extra time, yes, but saves a lot of hassle if things go wrong or plans change. My inbox is littered with countless versions of “I called Company A and they said it was Company B’s problem, but when I called Company B they sent me back to Company A.” (And that’s when the companies are legit. Don’t get me started on what happens when people book flights through companies with names like UnbelievablyImpossibleLowFares.com.)

But there are exceptions, and one of them is that both large (e.g. Expedia) and small (Jetline) online travel agents can put together packages that are not only convenient to book, but often cheaper than what you would pay if you bought everything separately. books . And local travel advisors can offer even more customization and valuable advice.

There are other times when you should use (or at least take advantage of) a middleman, such as when you use points to book a flight from your credit card’s rewards site. But beware: every time you introduce another company into the booking process, it can make things more difficult if something goes wrong. And while travelling, a lot goes wrong.

If you need advice on a best-laid itinerary gone wrong, send an email to TrippedUp@nytimes.com.

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