ATI Flights

ATI Flights is a web-based travel booking company that has long been known for giving travelers access to some of the cheapest airline tickets around for flights from the United States or Canada to destinations all over the world. The company operated at the website www.atiflights.com, but a quick online search for the company finds no links to it, and when you type the url address into your browser, you are immediately taken to the website www.flycheapabroad.com. A search for reviews of the company find a mixed bag, with many people referring to negative ratings on the Better Business Bureau’s website.

Reviews

A search online for how to get cheap airline tickets will quickly yield references to the ATI website, but when you try to find the site itself, it immediately defaults to the Fly Cheap Abroad site. Searching around for reviews of either do take you to reputable travel sites, but reading the postings that travellers have entered about their experiences with the company do not provide a clear picture one way or the other. There are definitely travellers who rave about the fact that the flight they located using the service was the cheapest around, and they have no complaint about the service they received. But other online posters report serious problems, including credit card charges that never went through and tickets that were never received, or customer service lines that kept them on hold interminably and then hung up on them. Many people refer those investigating whether the company is fraudulent of not to check out the Better Business Bureau, and a quick search of www.bbb.org does reveal an “F” rating for ATI.

Complaints

Many of the complaints that people have lodged against ATI seem to be about tickets that they were charged for but that never actually arrived. The website and company are described as being ticket consolidators, similar to Cheap Tickets or Expedia, and details indicate that booking a ticket for a flight through them was done in such a way that a passenger would not be aware of what carrier they were flying with, but they would know arrival and departure information and how many connections they needed to make.

For those people who were able to access the tickets they purchased, they were very pleased with the insanely cheap flights that they found. But for those who ended up disappointed, they found that they had very few options for getting their money back. There are over fifteen complaints lodged against ATI on the Better Business Bureau’s website, including problems with false advertising, problems with credits or refunds being issued and problems with service.

Many of the comments that can be found on travel review websites surmise that the company changed names from ATI to Fly Cheap Abroad in order to avoid lawsuits and escape the negative BBB ranking, but there is no evidence of that and the two companies do have different corporate addresses.

Contact

One of the biggest complaints that consumers have reported when discussing their experiences with Air Tickets International is that though it was a good site for finding insanely cheap flights, if a problem came up it was nearly impossible to make contact outside of the web commerce site itself.

Following up through the customer service lines resulted in long hold times, disconnections, and no actualy satisfactory response. Interestingly, there have been no complaints logged with the Better Business Bureau about the company since the year 2010, which is around the same time that the website started forwarded to the Fly Cheap Abroad name.