I just could not say “no” to his demand, so I moved towards him and he showed me something unbelievable. He was currently browsing the travel site that I created months ago, with a domain name cheapestinternationalflights.net, searching for cheapest flights from Oman to their native land, Cairo Egypt.
We are working in one of the Vocational Training Centers here in Oman as instructors. As the month of July and August is now fast approaching, many of our co-teachers are already booking their flights for a two months vacation.
Most of the Filipinos have already booked a flight via Cebupacific air, a Philippine based budget airline, now flying to and from Dubai. Some of the Egyptians are still searching for best deals on flight to Egypt and so it happened that one of them browsed my travel site.
As I move towards him, he was staring directly into my eyes and seems to be having a kind of question that he just can’t express due to the fact that, first and foremost, most of them (not all) are having hard times in adopting English as their second language.
With a couple of hand gestures pointing to his computer, I found out that he can’t really agree with what he has just seen right in front of his computer screen. When I look at it with much anticipation, I saw a something that I never have seen in my whole life and that’s really ridiculous.
It was a search result on flights from Jetradar.com showing a long list of flights from Oman to Cairo dated June 24, 2015 departure and August 31, 2015 return date, sold only for $3.00, yes it was only $3.00.
When I first saw it, we’re both smiling to each other and he’s a kind of losing trust to the travel site that I created. So I tried to explain. I assumed that maybe the airline is just giving a huge discount on flights or if not the airlines, maybe the travel agency that sells those flights online.
Even if he can’t articulately explain his disbelief, I know very clearly that he cannot really accept the truth if ever my point was right. In short, he’s already ridiculing me and may no longer do the flight search on my travel site.
That was hard by the way. With the intention of convincing him to stay using my travel site, I was able to come up into a new idea just to protect my integrity. I told him that maybe that was just due to the firewall used by the school that filters some of the websites that people are browsing in this vicinity.
And so he agreed and nodded. But before that, I have to explain to him what “firewall” is and why it is being used. To the best of my knowledge, which I am not so certain if I am saying the right thing, I was able to calm him down and make him believed that there is really nothing wrong with my travel site.
When I returned to my table, I have that kind of little confusion and I want to end it up right away. I know that regardless of how cheap an airline was, no matter how old and defective an air carrier may be, flights can never be sold in only $3.00.
So what I did was, I did the search using similar flight information that he entered when he searched cheap airline flights to Egypt using my own laptop. I typed the same information on Jetradar flight search tool in my website and clicked the button that says “FIND.”
When the browser has finished loading, there it is again. A long list of flights from Jetradar search results all at $3.00. When I checked the inner pages knowing that flights are sorted out from cheapest to the expensive one as usually shown by most flight search engines, I found out that flight from different airlines from Oman to Egypt, regardless of the airlines were all offered at the same rate, only $3.00.
I said to myself “this must be crazy” so I took a screen capture of it all and save it on my desktop. I went to the vendor’s website which was tripsta.com and look for their contact information. Finally, I got their helpdesk email address.
Without wasting time, I opened my Gmail account and started typing words that I have in my mind. I just want to clarify those crazy flight offers from their website. So, with few sentences I have written I clicked send and there it goes.
After few minutes, I got a confirmation from their no-reply email account that my message was received by their staff and in a few more minutes, somebody from their support team must be sending message to me to address the issue I presented.
To end this crazy story, let me just incorporate here what Tripsta.com replied to my inquiry, shown below.
With that message from Tripsta.com, my mind was cleared and I showed that message to my Egyptian co-teacher with much explanation for every word on it. And so, the story was over.
Lessons I learned
1. Just be cool when something unexplainable happens
2. Do not search for cheapest International flights once
3. Travel agencies are sometimes having their own technical problems
