I am absolutely frustrated with British Airways at this point and their seemingly lousy process they have for cancelling and refunding tickets. In the past I’ve had almost no trouble receiving refunds for award tickets and paid tickets, but as of late I’ve had trouble with both.
So I recently cancelled a ticket on British Airways because my travel plans had changed. Normally when buying revenue tickets, it is very difficult to cancel or change tickets and gain any value out of them, but I had bought a higher fare class and so I was due back a reasonable refund. So I cancelled my tickets online and was promised a total refund amount of $9294.36. I finally ended up receiving a refund amount of $8449.83, which is $844.53 less than what I was promised. Sad part is every customer agent I’ve spoken to agrees that I received the wrong refund amount, but absolutely nothing has been done over 2.5 weeks to rectify the issue.
First of all, every time I call customer service, they seem to go through this process of redirecting me to different departments because it seems like they aren’t quite sure who handles these sort of situations. After about an hour on the phone I finally end up back to the department I started off with in the first place!
Second of all, I’ve already called British Airways more than 3 times regarding the issue and each time the agent picks up the phone to reassure me that the refund amount I was expecting is in fact correct. While they always apologize for the inconvenience, each agent seems to think the final message never really got through to the right department. They finally end by saying that they would immediately send yet another message to their accounting department asking for this to be sorted out. When I mention that I had already wasted so much time on the issue, the agent always promises to call within 3 days to give me an update on when I would be getting the additional $844.53 back.
Well no surprise here, but 5 more days have passed and there has not been a single communication from the BA team regarding the issue and the money has not been refunded back to me as of yet. On my most recent phone call I even gave them the ticket number of the passenger who did not get the proper refund (it’s listed on the Credit Card Statement). You can see here that 3 out of the 4 passengers received the proper refund, but the other one got exactly $844.53 less.
After wasting more than 4 hours on the phone with BA, I’ve really started to think about who really has the time to check that every penny has been refunded properly. This is a pretty large sum to not refund, but in other instances it may just be a few dollars here and there. If it were just a few dollars, I may not have noticed this quite so easily. A few cents here and there, I’m sure adds up in the grand scheme of things for big companies.
To add to it all, I recently cancelled an AA flight booked using BA miles (about a week ago) and the miles for that have not been refunded back as of yet.
Anyway British Airways has really gotten on my nerves with this incident. Has anyone else experienced similar situations where they had trouble receiving the proper refund?
