Question: I hope you can assist me in getting a refund for a duplicate ticket to Europe that I purchased through Lufthansa. My daughter attends Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and did a semester abroad last fall. We decided to pick her up at the end of the semester and travel for a couple of weeks.
The school’s travel agency made the arrangements for my daughter and I worked through my own travel agency. We asked the agent in New York to change my daughter’s return flight to coincide with our departure.
When we got to the airport in Florence, Italy, my daughter realized she didn’t have her ticket. She had thrown it away when we changed her reservation, thinking it was no longer any good.
A Lufthansa representative told us we could either buy a new ticket or wait until the travel agency opened to get a copy of the old ticket. This was on Friday, Dec. 30 and if she missed the flight she was supposed to take, she wouldn’t have been able to get another one until Jan. 2.
Since we didn’t want to leave her there alone, we purchased a new ticket with the assurance that we could get a refund once we provided documentation on the old ticket.
Since then, we’ve e-mailed our travel agent, but have had no luck getting our refund. It’s been almost two years, and the airline still has my money. Can you help me get our 890 euros back? – Gayle Grafstrom-Corman, Maplewood, Minn.
Answer: Two years is way, way too long to wait for a refund. Your travel agent should have been able to persuade Lufthansa to issue a refund in a fraction of that time.
But let’s start with your daughter. She shouldn’t have thrown her ticket away, obviously. It’s an easy mistake to make, considering that practically all airline tickets are electronic these days. But Lufthansa was still using paper tickets in Venice when your family visited Italy, and the agent you spoke with needed to see a real ticket.
From there on out, I think you did everything right. Buying a new ticket made a lot of sense, and so did enlisting your travel agent to secure a refund. Your agent charged you a booking fee when you bought your tickets, which should cover services such as helping process a refund. You work with a human agent so that you don’t have to do it alone.
I contacted Lufthansa, which looked for your paperwork but couldn’t find it. So the airline got in touch with your agent to find out if it still had your refund application. It turns out the form was completed by your agent more than a month after your return but never sent to Lufthansa, according to airline spokeswoman Jennifer Urbaniak. “Apparently, the original agent handling this claim is no longer working there,” she said.
Unfortunately, this is a common problem. I’ve spoken with hundreds, if not thousands, of air travelers whose refunds got snagged by a system that’s designed to take your money in a split second but return it months, or years, later. If airlines can figure out how to take your money quickly, they should figure out how to return it quickly, too.
Until they do, the only way to ensure that you’ll get a timely refund is to apply relentless pressure on your airline and travel agency. Don’t let up, otherwise you might be in for an extended wait.
Lufthansa has processed your refund.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I can relate to this problem. Back in June 2007, I flew Amman to Bahrain with Royal Jordanian, code share with Gulf Air. I was booked Business class, which as you know, is a little more expense than coach. There was a problem with the airplanr and it was switched with an all-coach configured aircraft. I was assured by the staff of a partial refund due to the downgrade. I applied for a refund via my travel agent in Tel Aviv to the Royal Jordanian offices. Only after continual and constant nagging on my part and a letter of complaint, did I receive the refund at the end of December, a full 6 months later. The airlines are all too quick to demand money upfront for any change the client wants to make but slower than a snail in making a refund.
Richard
As an agent I see that there was not proper follow-up on either the agency’s part or the traveler (unless there is something not stated here). The agency, when the original agent left, should have made sure someone took over the refund process from the original. That the original agent left is no excuse (and perhaps I can see why the original agent left, it should not have taken a month to prepare a refund request). But too, the traveler should have hounded the agency once the refund was taking longer than about 3 months. (That’s about how long I let things lie before starting the inquiries – as noted, the airlines take your $$ in the blink of an eye, but are very poor in returning it; 8-12 weeks is pretty standard). It shouldn’t have taken 2 years and Chris’s intervention under the circumstances. The original fault was the agency’s, but the traveler should have been more insistent with them.
Suggestion. I always copy in the client on any refund request so that they can see when I requested the refund. If you do not know when a request was made, ask the agency for a copy of the original request. Copying in the client keeps me on my toes (I can’t procrastinate), and the client has part of the paper trail. Do not feel bad about following up with an agent. As Chris said, the client paid a fee which implies the agent will follow-up on things like this. At the same time, take into consideration the fact that we (both client and agent) are at the mercy of the airlines!!
It amazes me that the airlines can take my money in minutes, but it takes forever to get refunds. For example, if you cancel a fully refundable ticket on AA.com, for some strange reason, the system believes that you don’t want a refund. You have to actually call the airline to get a refund, which can take up to two billing cycles. I’d add that into the passenger’s bill of rights. Refunds must be processed within 7 days.
While there’s a number of problems getting money back from airlines, not everything is their fault as this article shows. While the customer thought the airline wasn’t doing it’s part they never made sure the agency had done it’s part. A simple call to them should have made both aware the paperwork hadn’t been sent to the airline.
As for refunds taking time to show up on a credit card statement there’s more involved then just the airline. As carver stated in can take up to two statements to show up, but that’s NOT because of the airline, but of the nature of how banks process credits. I agree the airlines should have a timeline to issue the credit, but the banks also need a time limit for posting it. I had a client one time that kept calling insisting I didn’t issue a refund because it hadn’t shown up. I provided the paperwork, but he couldn’t understand that I had done all I could do to get the money refunded. In the end the problem was that his bank only processed credits at the end of each months statement date for each customer (but on the statements just showed the transaction date, and not the posting date, thus making the customer think everything was instant). Federal law governs these transactions, but right now doesn’t require anything close to what any reasonable person would expect for timelines.
I also waited 2 years for a refund from United from a cancelled flight due to a death in the family. When I first called their refund desk – operated out of India – they agreed to refund the cost of the tickets after I faxed a copy of my father’s obituary. But the refund never came. 6 months or more later, I recontacted them to see what happened and they denied any knowledge of my previous inquiry. They also informed me that even if I were eligible for the refund, since it was an aged ticket (now a year old) they would deduct $100 per ticket or so. After 6 more months of e-mailing and calling, and reporting UA to the Better Business Bureau and the Department of Transportation, I received a refund for about half the value of the original tickets. This behavior on the part of UA is shameless and simply exemplifies the state of the airline industry today and UA’s standing within that industry. I am now using up my remaining miles at UA and will not fly them again when I can possibly avoid them.