TICKET

Help, my AirTran tickets expired — is my money gone forever?

Talk about adding insult to injury.

Before Donna Adams was scheduled to fly from Orlando to Indianapolis on AirTran back in 2010, she hurt her back and had to cancel her trip. When she discovered her condition was a lot worse than she thought, she had to postpone the new flight she’d booked with her ticket credit.

“An MRI confirmed that I had herniated a disc in my back,” she says. “After several courses of physical therapy, chiropractic care, therapeutic massage, oral steroids and anti-inflammatory steroid injections I elected to have surgery.”
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26 comments

Airline tells hospitalized passenger “people pretend to be sick all the time”

When Rela Geffen was hospitalized after suffering from congestive heart failure recently, she assumed her airline would take care of her. She was in Georgia on a business trip, but she’d paid an extra $19 for trip interruption insurance on her US Airways tickets.

And this is one of those times when I’m happy to say that the insurance came through for her. US Airways charged her a $125 change fee and a fare difference to fly back to Philadelphia a few days after her originally-scheduled flight, plus a $25 fee for making the change by phone, and her insurance picked up the tab.

“They were great and paid the $325 promptly after I returned home,” she says.

But that wasn’t the problem.
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54 comments

Maybe I won’t be home for Christmas

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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36 comments

Don’t wait too long to ask Southwest Airlines for a refund

Thomas Travia bought a ticket from Philadelphia to Omaha on Southwest Airlines but couldn’t use all of it. Nothing unusual about that — plans change all the time, and the airline offers some of the most flexible ticket change policies in the industry.

What sets this case apart is the type of ticket Travia got. Since he bought it at the airport, it was paper. Then he lost the ticket halfway through his trip and later asked Southwest for a refund. The airline told him he needed to wait, and now it’s telling him he waited too long. Maybe that’s because he traveled in 2008.

This is a strange one, my friends.
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98 comments

The Expedia ticket vouchers that never existed

Question: We recently canceled a trip from Minneapolis to Asuncion, Paraguay, that we had booked on Delta Air Lines through Expedia. We were issued two flight vouchers, which we are trying to redeem. But Expedia isn’t letting us.

The vouchers — one for $1,186, the other for $936 — were supposed to be valid until Jan. 15. But when I called Delta to cash them in, we were told the vouchers had already expired in September.
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52 comments

The Travel Troubleshooter: Hey, what happened to my ticket refund?

Question: My wife and I planned a trip to Antigua this summer and purchased round-trip flights, hotel room and a kayak excursion through Expedia in December.

Everything was a “go” until we received a call one day in early April from an Expedia representative informing us of a change to our American Airlines flights. American had apparently changed quite a few flights to the island and, unfortunately, none of the changes worked for us.

The Expedia rep said that if we chose not to accept the changes for the flights that we could expect to see a full refund due to an “unacceptable” involuntary schedule change by the airline. After getting the rep to verify that we could cancel the hotel, excursion and flights at no charge, I authorized them to go ahead and cancel the trip completely.

The rep was able to instantly provide a refund for the hotel and kayak trip, but advised that the refund for the flights would take between four to six weeks to go through.

Six weeks later, having received no refund, I checked with Expedia. It informed me that it had already given me a refund, but it turns out it only was referring to the first refund. I emailed Expedia back to let it know that it got the wrong refund, but have not received a response yet. It concerns me that no one can seem to tell us when we will ever get the refund or why it has been held up for so long.

I am at my wits’ end with Expedia, Chris. Can you please help me get this resolved? My wife and I would be so grateful. — Dan Lachapelle, Sudbury, Canada

Answer: I wouldn’t be so quick to blame Expedia. Airlines are known to drag their feet when it comes to refunds, and my initial reading of your problem suggests American might have something to do with the delay, too.

This is a common problem. You buy your tickets through an agency, and the agency takes your money. But if you want a refund — or something else, like a name change — then the agency defers to the airline.
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65 comments