Question: I recently booked an American Airlines flight on CheapOAir.com from Kansas City to the Virgin Islands to attend my brother’s wedding.
We were issued electronic tickets and our itinerary was confirmed with reservation ID and a booking number. Our credit card was charged $1,643.
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Question: I’m having a problem with a refund for American Airlines tickets I booked through CheapOair.com.
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Question: We are supposed to fly to Australia for Christmas to be with my wife’s parents, but we’re not sure if we’ll be able to make it. I hope you can help us.
Last summer, we booked our domestic flights from Melbourne to Cairns on Jetstar Airways through CheapOair.com. We received a confirmation from CheapOair and my wife even spent 40 minutes on the phone with their billing department, to make sure the transaction went through. She also phoned CheapOair two days later to verify the transaction and received assurances all was clear.
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Question: I’ve been having trouble getting a refund from a flight that was canceled. I bought a ticket through CheapOair for a nonstop flight from Chicago to Milan for $670. A few months later, I got an email from them that the flight had been canceled.
They offered a substitute flight that was in no way comparable, so I called them and requested a refund. They said I had to take it up with the airline, which was Air One out of Italy, so I called them and they said no, that I must request the refund through CheapOair.
I then spent about an hour on the phone with CheapOair, explaining my situation over and over again with different agents that I was transferred to. Finally I spoke with someone who confidently said, yes, it would be no problem for me to get a refund, but that it might take up to 12 weeks.
More than three months later, I still hadn’t received my money, so I called the CheapOair agent I had spoken to before and no one seemed to know who she was. I spent another hour being transferred from person to person at CheapOair and the consensus with them was, “What refund? You need to request that through the airline.”
So I spoke with someone at Air One again and they very firmly repeated what they had said before — that they would definitely provide a refund but that the proper channel was through CheapOair. Many phone calls and many hours later I still had gotten nowhere with CheapOair.
It’s now been almost a year since I first asked for a refund. Help! — Dani Lind, Soldiers Grove, Wis.
Answer: CheapOair should have helped you get a quick refund from Air One. As your travel agent, CheapOair should have advocated for you, rather than sending you directly to the airline for help.
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Jack Vanesko thought the instructions to the online agents at CheapOair were clear: They were supposed to cancel his traveling companion’s flight from New Delhi to Lhasa. Instead, they canceled both tickets.
“When I became aware that this had happened, I made daily e-mail and phone requests to have them reinstate the flights,” he says. “I was assured repeatedly that this had been done, and this was being handled by the concern team. It was, in fact, never done.”
Needless to say, Vanesko’s trip was a nightmare, and he missed the Tibet tour. (I’ll get to the unpleasant details in a moment.) Question is, does CheapOair owe him anything for having screwed up is reservation — and if so, what?
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When a company does one of its customers wrong, the last person to feel bad for it is usually me. But this CheapOair case has left me deeply conflicted. It involves William Bensinger’s flight from Seattle to Antalya, Turkey — a flight that didn’t happen for reasons beyond his control. And beyond the control of his online travel agency.
The biggest problem started when Delta 232 had an eight-hour mechanical delay in Seattle.
I called CheapOair to ask what to do since we would miss out flight in Amsterdam on SunExpress 103 to Antalya. Since the ticket was issued by Turkish Airlines, CheapOair agents assured me that when I arrived in Amsterdam, Turkish Air would rebook me on one of their flights.
This information was totally incorrect.
In fact, he says, Turkish Air wouldn’t rebook him and he ended up spending the night in Amsterdam and paying another $505 for two one-way tickets to Turkey.
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And they were not tears of joy at having found a bargain. Elizabeth Hutton’s mother, Mary Ellyn, bought a round trip ticket from Cincinnati to Tallinn, Estonia, with stopovers in Newark and Stockholm. But something was wrong with the reservation, and she had to pay for another flight.
Does that sound familiar?
Despite repeated attempts to contact the online travel agency, CheapoAir wouldn’t help.
“They ripped my mother off,” her daughter wrote to me. “They refuse to reimburse her. And what’s worse, CheapoAir made my mother cry.”
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