Emily Day’s family vacation nearly collapses when FlightHub’s system assigns random passport numbers to their tickets, forcing them to buy new flights. Why won’t the airline refund the tickets they couldn’t use?

Question 

I booked a flight from Buenos Aires to Puerto Iguazú, Argentina, for my family. I bought the tickets on Flybondi, an Argentine low-fare airline, through FlightHub. Despite carefully entering our flight details, the airline said our passport numbers were random characters. We had to buy new tickets for $1,114 on Flybondi.

FlightHub blamed the airline, but Flybondi confirmed FlightHub entered fake passport data. FlightHub has refused to give us a refund, claiming the tickets are nonrefundable. How can I get FlightHub to take responsibility for this costly error? — Emily Day, Brookline, Mass.  

Answer

FlightHub should have ensured its system accurately transmitted your passport information to Flybondi. Under U.S. Department of Transportation guidelines, ticket agents must provide complete and correct booking details. FlightHub’s failure to do so — and its use of placeholder passport numbers — breached that responsibility.  

Could you have avoided this? Possibly. If you had checked your Flybondi reservations online, you might have seen the gibberish passport information sooner. You tried to do that, but the airline advised you to check in at the gate. 

Keeping a thorough paper trail, as you did, was critical. You reached out to FlightHub’s customer service via chat and spoke to a representative once you were in Puerto Iguazú. He opened a case and eventually acknowledged that this was not your fault and agreed to resolve the problem for your return flight. 

You emailed FlightHub photos of your passports. Unfortunately, FlightHub couldn’t modify your flight records in time for your return flight, but you were able to resolve the discrepancy directly with Flybondi for your return flight — so, no need to buy a second ticket to get back to Buenos Aires. 

Even after FlightHub admitted that it screwed up, it still wouldn’t refund your tickets, arguing that they were nonrefundable. Of course, they were nonrefundable — but you couldn’t use them because of FlightHub’s booking error. 

All it would have taken to get you a refund was for someone at FlightHub to review your paper trail. If I had to guess, I’d say FlightHub is processing its customer service cases using artificial intelligence, which might have missed this. But there’s no question about it, this was obviously a FlightHub mistake.

You might have been able to bypass this nonsense. By escalating your case to FlightHub’s executives using the executive contacts on my consumer advocacy site, Elliott.org, you might have gotten a quick resolution. You say you tried to do that, but no one responded.

I contacted FlightHub on your behalf.

“Upon reviewing the situation, we identified that the issue stemmed from a technical error on our end,” a representative told me. “The customer contacted us the day before their return flight to request a correction to their passport information. We promptly submitted the request to the airline, but the airline was able to assist the customer directly before they responded to us.

FlightHub issued a full refund of your original flights plus a $100 voucher as a goodwill gesture, which you accepted.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s never to assume your third-party booking site got it right. Always check your flight directly with the airline, and well in advance of your flight.