It pays to have experience when you've got a problem with a Virgin

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Clean out your minds, ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking about the airline, Virgin Atlantic. This weekend I was hunting for flights for my holidays in October. I found a fantastic deal on the flight I wanted - about £110 per person less than the official Virgin Atlantic price. That's a lot of money but I know from hard experience that something that looks too good to be true is often just that. The deal was through an agent called 'Gotogate'. I found a similar deal with a travel agency called Southall Travel - based in Southall, the very Asian suburb close to Heathrow airport. I checked some forum posts on Tripadvisor. People were clearly saying that Gotogate was a risky place to buy as they'd found them almost impossible to contact. Others were split on whether Southall was the best or worst idea in the world. I was wary. I want my travels to be relaxed and trouble free. I don't want to be worrying that I might get an email at the last minute moving my flight to a different day or destination. I contacted my friend who works for a major middle eastern airline. I asked if he could explain how it's possible that these agencies have better prices than the airlines. He explained that they either get better prices because they commit to a fixed number of seats on every flight, or that they are working towards bonus-related targets and sometimes sell cheap to achieve those targets and get their rewards. He suggested that I check whether Virgin Atlantic has a price match guarantee and to see if I could get some money off that way. I found online that they did but it looked very complicated. I called VA and had a rather feisty discussion with a guy who told me that they weren't going to make it easy for me - but he did at least tell me the booking classes that I'd get from them direct and that I'd have to match with any other site. Neither of the two cheap sites would give me the info I'd need to invoke the price guarantee but Expedia had the flight £30 cheaper and I could generate the necessary screen shots. I downloaded the info, booked the VA flights direct and then send off the Price Guarantee appeal. This morning I got a mail to say they would be processing the refund of the £60 within a few days. I had already spent my refund (and a bit more) upgrading the outbound seats to exit row seats so I was happy. You might ask why I didn't just go for the cheap option and that's a very valid question. As the guy at VA told me "If anything goes wrong, you'll want to be booked direct with us" and he had a point. The last time I flew with VA to India we missed the return flight entirely due to my mistake. It had been a 'rewards' flight booked with points and I was amazed that they charged us just $50 total to change to the next day. Had I been with an agent, it could have been a lot more expensive or a long delay. When you book so long in advance, you know that flight times might change. If that happens, I'll hear straight from VA. I might not hear at all from an agency as I've learned with internal flights in India when the agent didn't tell me all the times changed and one flight was cancelled. Since I have ongoing flights after I arrive and before I return, I'd rather be dealing with the airline direct.