FlightNetwork.com review: Deceiving business practices

Before starting the review, I suggest readers who have bought tickets through flightnetwork.com to read this article by cbc from 2010 about how they sold tickets for flights that were unavailable to a couple in Vancouver, Canada: https://www.cbc.ca/news/online-travel-site-sells-unavailable-flights-1.949172. They were given a refund months after the flight as a result of CBC News inquiries. Make sure this does not happen to you.

Since this review will be mostly negative, I will mention the positive thing first: in the end, they refunded the money I asked for (which they told me was non-refundable), but ONLY after I told them of my plans to seek legal counsel. Despite this, this business is so incredibly misleading at a level I have never seen before that I still feel compelled to warn people about them.

I purchased airplane tickets form their website, flightnetwork.com on Saturday, October 26. They give you the option to purchase Trip Cancellation Protection, and the price displayed was $2.02, and I decided to purchase it, not realizing that in very tiny print at the bottom was the disclaimer "Price shown are per passenger per day", meaning, the actual total price was $66.55 (see the first picture I uploaded). Now, this is a very common strategy that many businesses engage in to mislead the customers, but Flight Network went a step further. Most online travel agencies, after you fill out all information, send you to a web page that allows you to review your order before you decide to book, but flightnetwork.com does not do that. Rather, the total price that you will pay is only displayed at the very top of the web page, which is out of sight by the time you are given the option to purchase the policy, which happens near the bottom of the page (See second picture I uploaded). By the time you fill out all information and you click on "Complete Your Booking" at the bottom of the page, you would have not seen that you are paying way more than you thought (see third picture I uploaded. Nowhere near this part of the page do you see the total price that you will pay). And after you click on it, it is already too late: there is another fine print that says "By completing this booking you have agreed to FlightNetwork's Terms & Conditions", which happen to mention that the policy is non-refundable once you make the purchase.

Here is one more example that shows that FlightNetwork consciously tries to mislead it's customers: The trip cancellation price is actually NOT per day. It is actually a flat rate that, while it seems to depend on your travel destination, it does not depend on the duration of the trip, as I will now show. On Octorber 28 at around 8:30pm, I made 3 different searches for flights to the same destination from the same airport, but each of them had a different duration. This are the prices for the trip protection:

1) Return and Departure Dates: November 30 till December 4 (5 day trip)
Price of Travel Protection per day: $13.31
Total Price of Travel Protection: $66.55
2) Return and Departure Dates: November 30 till December 15 (16 day trip)
Price of Travel Protection per day: $4.16
Total Price of Travel Protection: $66.55
3) Return and Departure Dates: November 30 till January 2 (34 day trip)
Price of Travel Protection per day: $1.96
Total Price of Travel Protection: $66.55

As can be seen, regardless of how long your trip is, the price price of the Trip Cancellation Protection is exactly the same: $66.55. If FlightNetwork had no intention of being misleading, they would just say on the webpage the price is a flat rate of $66.55. To me, the only reasonable explanation as to why FlightNetwork would go out of their way to take this flat rate, divide it by the number of days in the trip, show you very clearly on the web page this price per day (which is way less than the total price), and then write on a tiny fine print that the this price is actually per day, is because they are very actively and consciously trying to mislead the customer. I suggest the reader to do searches on their own so they can convince themselves that this is indeed true. Hopefully, FlightNetwork will update their website to change how they portray their pricing.

While I do acknowledge that the customer has a responsibility to be careful and always read the fine print, and while it is true that many well known businesses engage in very similar practices, that still will never excuse FlightNetwork's behavior in engaging in such dishonest, disingenuous, and abhorrent practices. Therefore, I highly recommend anyone reading this review to never engage in business with FlightNetwork.

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