Booking.com complaint: Impossible to rebook flight, resulting in loss of ticket money

We booked a flight from Tampa to DC for 01092022 so my daughter could return from a visit to FL directly to her campus @ American University in DC. Because of the rise in COVID cases, the school moved to online classes only for the month of January and encouraged students to remain off campus during that time. As such, we needed to fly her from Tampa back to our home in CT, rather than DC.

We tried several times to deal with a customer service agent to rebook the flight for a later time. The first time we tried, the call was cut off after about 15 minutes and we were unable to rebook the flight.

The second time, we were told it was possible to rebook for a later date but that the American Airlines portal was down and we needed to call back in 5 or 6 hours.

When we called back later that day (attempt 3), we waited in the queue for 20 minutes just to get to an agent, then we struggled to speak with the agent- the connection was terrible (constant crackling on the line) plus the agent’s accent made it very difficult to understand what he was saying. We were in the middle of trying to rebook for a date in March when we were cut off again, 45 minutes into the call.

Before we were cut off, it was impossible to get a straight answer from the agent- we were telling him exactly which flight we wanted to book and he seemed to be unable to find that flight even though we were looking at it on our screen. He was quoting us a price that was nowhere near what the airline was selling the seat for, unable to explain the discrepancy.

After the 3rd call, we gave up, as the flight was the next morning and all of our efforts had thus far been in vain.

The next morning, my daughter got an email, asking her to check in for the flight, despite the fact that we had spoken to both the airline and Booking.com four or five times, ing them to the fact that she would NOT BE ON THE FLIGHT and asking them to release the seat.

As a result of this fiasco, we lost approximately $125 and several hours of our time.