Flight credit

Cartoon of a weary couple driving a car down a straight desert highway lined with cactuses at sunset, as an airplane flies overhead.

American Airlines delayed my flight, so I drove. Why can’t I get a refund?

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Michael Damarino and his wife thought they had done everything right. They booked refundable American Airlines tickets through Expedia from Boston to Tucson by way of Phoenix, paying extra for the flexibility. Then a 90-minute delay in Phoenix, blamed on a sick first officer and a baggage weight problem, made them miss their connection. With no later flights available, they did the resourceful thing: they rented a car and drove the final 100 miles so they would not lose their vacation. What they did not realize is that solving the airline’s problem themselves had quietly turned them into a “no-show” for that last leg. In the airline’s system, skipping a flight without canceling it first triggers a clause that can cancel the rest of your itinerary and wipe out the ticket’s value, even when you paid for a refundable fare. American offered only a flight credit and called the ticket nonrefundable. Expedia pointed back to the airline, and the airline pointed to Expedia.

Illustration of an Aer Lingus representative offering a voucher to a frustrated customer checking his watch, with the caption “One year later…”

Aer Lingus issued her voucher but ghosted her husband for over a year

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After a death in the family, Beatrijs Albarran and her husband Jorge had to cancel their Aer Lingus flights. The airline issued their refunds as vouchers, $938 for her and $925 for him, and emailed that both had been processed. But when Beatrijs called the next month to book a new trip, an agent told her Jorge’s voucher was never actually issued. The couple, who live in Buffalo, New York, wanted to fly from Toronto to Scotland because the fares are better, and asked whether the vouchers could be reissued in Canadian dollars. Beatrijs received hers in U.S. dollars within a reasonable time. Jorge’s never arrived. For more than a year she called repeatedly, hearing the same response that a supervisor was working on it, while automated emails said the case was under review. More than 15 months after Aer Lingus said it processed the voucher, it still had not appeared. Under Aer Lingus policy, vouchers are issued in the same currency as the original booking, so no conversion was needed to book from a Canadian airport, and the Department of Transportation requires airlines to process refund and credit requests promptly.