For your own protection, never ever ever ever use the most wretched travel agency on the face of the entire planet earth, www.via.com, which unfortunately has treated me impossibly badly. Apparently they treated other thailand-based customers equally badly, so frankly i am on a campaign to ensure they never get any customers ever again! Thus, herein below i will set out as clear a chronology as i can to explain what has happened…

First, some background. I am a canadian citizen living in bangkok, thailand. Back on january 30th, 2019, i paid a large sum of money (C. 25000 thai baht, or well over 1, 000 canadian dollars) for a complicated itinerary (Leaving bangkok on september 24th, 2019 returning to thailand on october 25th, 2019) to travel home to visit my widowed mother, with whom i have not visited for nearly three (3) years, in a small city in western canada [airport code yqr]. The proper e-ticket was then issued without delay by the thai branch of www.via.com, so i assumed all was well.

Then, lamentably, within the past week i started to receive messages that very undesirable changes had been made to my flights, first by the ordinarily reliable canadian-based westjet airlines, for the canadian domestic flights, and then later by hong kong airlines, for the international flights. The changes by hong kong airlines on the hkg (Hong kong) to yvr (Vancouver) route, in both directions, would have made the rest of the trip impossible in terms of connecting to the domestic flights, so of course i contacted hong kong airlines “hka”, by phone. The people at hka intervened with via.com to get my itinerary properly revised, but now following up with via.com to get the revised e-ticket sent to my email has proven to be a completely frustrating, surrealistic, kafka-esque nightmare!!! 4 days now of being repeatedly put on hold, subjected to hours on end of insincere lying prerecorded messages, phone calls and emails completely ignored, repeated promises of the e-ticket arriving asap turning out to be total lies, and absolutely no one taking responsibility to send the ticket as promised!! Two days ago, as a particularly egregious example, via.com sent an email to my thai wife (!?!?), not to me, supposedly with the e-ticket enclosed, but the email attachment that was supposed to have the e-ticket actually contained no information whatsoever!!! That is absolutely unbelievable — how could any proper customer service agent make such an unforgivable mistake??? Frankly, i think that “error” was made on purpose so that via.com could keep my money — the ticket is theoretically non-refundable — and not have to issue anything… Since that unbelievable incident, of course i have spent two more days being lied to, put on hold, ignored, subjected to hours more of repeated prerecorded music and lying messages (“your call is important to us” nonsense — if it was important to you, you would deal with me properly!!!), shuffled from person to person on these expensive international phone calls from bangkok to bangalore, and blatantly lied to both by email and even, audaciously, in person-to-person speech…

This whole situation is, of course, utterly absurd. I am still holding out faint hope that the e-ticket will eventually arrive, but things do not look at all promising. Therefore, if i do not get proper resolution, please please please never deal with this evil, irresponsible www.via.com, and in fact, if people based in india were to organize a proper formal boycott of that wretched gang of lying thieves, i would be happy to serve as a foreign-based native english speaker testifying on behalf of all the people in thailand who have also been lied to and cheated by this shameful and pathetically disgraceful excuse for a company and its (Lack of) customer service…