Last week I noted that it had been more than 18 days since Air France cancelled my first class ticket and 1.) I still had not been notified and 2.) my money was still being held.
Well, Air France reached out to me and I have my money back. Not sure if it was the result of my post or just random timing, but the note came one day after my last post.
This email arrived in my inbox:
Dear Mr KLINT,
I am contacting you further to your cancelled reservation in La Première due to a fare error.
I can appreciate your disappointment as you were looking forward to your journey and please accept our sincere apologies if you felt let down by our services on this occasion.
You have mentioned that the refund of your fare has not yet been reflected onto the original method of payment used for the purchase of your ticket. For your kind information, we are currently investigating the matter and we will contact you soon.
We thank you for your patience.
Best regards,
Katia B.
Customer Care
And the refund came one day later…
Now What?
I don’t know what I’ll do now. I know some are fighting this. Some, at least one, have actually flown it. As I have said before, I would have dropped this had Air France contacted me within 24 hours. But they took three weeks to actually reach out and four days to cancel the reservation. I would never try to argue this wasn’t a mistake fare. But I do think Air France should honor all fares it issues, or at least all fares not cancelled within 24 hours.
What do you think? We must pick our battles wisely and I do not want to get sidetracked on this issue. At the same time…I ask the same question I continue to ask: imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. We would have received no mercy. That needs to be addressed…
image: Air France
I fully agree that Air France was completely wrong and I share your position on the matter but your post on the matter was more than enough. Leave it, its not worth it. You have a bigger battle to deal with with Aeroplan, that should get your attention because that was truly illegal. Just keep the Air France stuff in your back pocket, and when they do something truly wrong, you can fight everything, including this, then.
You have a beautiful chance to highlight the ridiculous imbalance between the airline and the consumer in this case. I sincerely hope you do decide to fight this because it could result in much needed limits on the ability of an airline to cancel a fare. Clearly there need to be reasonable limits on the ability of an airline to cancel a fare. This could be the case that results in those limits if you choose to move forward.
I think what you need to do is to make it more expensive for them to cancel the fare on you the next time. I would go ahead and book all my hotels (lowest price and non-cancellable) and tours right away. Then per DOT rules, they have to reimburse for that also. If it is too expensive, then it would be cheaper for them just to honor the ticket.
I won’t take JohnC’s advice if I were you. Do this too many times and some airlines might pre-emptively designate you as “persona non-grata”.
It depends how you fight it. If you fight so you can fly first class on your particular ticket and don’t care about anyone else but you, I don’t think people will care or defend your decision. If you fight it so you can require airlines to cancel within 24 hours or other rules that clearly help others down the road I’m all for it. Just imagine how popular you will become if thanks to you the rules become fair to everyone, not just the airlines. So it all depends what you are trying to achieve (i.e true consumer rights, not some kind of PR stunt).
Chris, I want a 24 hour rule to go both ways. I’m fighting this for all consumers. I won’t sign an NDA…
Did you ask for an explanation of why no travel alternatives were offered by the airline to show goodwill and true contrition for the disappointment created?
Fight it Matt. We need someone that is a PITA to fight for the rest of us.
My only concern: you are focused on this for the narrow concern of self aggranndizment and not a wider concern of social justice and you will not hesitate to sell us short.
If its beyond a 24hr time frame, tell air france they have to pay a penalty, equivalent to the penalty it charges their customers for cancellations outside the 24hrs window.
Your battle should go along this grounds if u would like it to happen. U are putting them on a higher level of service delivery.
Hello Matthew,
I’m from Vietnam and currently living in Germany. I was just scrolling down the Google search results when I found your post, which is so related I can’t help leaving a comment. Hope that you won’t mind!
Lately (last 14.2) about 1000 tickets were booked by Vietnamese and others from all over the world via the Air France website on Vietnamese domain. And on the following day (15-17.2) all the unused tickets were cancelled “due to an incorrect fare filling” as they claimed. They even canceled the outbound flights of those who had already used the inbound flights in their round trip. And for the rest we received a refund receipt which is supposed to pay us back an amount smaller than what they charged us before. Not to mentioned that we have no idea when will we receive our money back.
Apparently there is nothing you could do to help us, I just want to tell this fraudulent accident to someone as I couldn’t find any official apology from the Air France even when they literally caused a storm among Vietnamese living abroad. But as it happened even to first class travellers like you, I don’t think there is much we can do but waiting.
Thank you for your sharing ’cause at least more people would know how bad a customers service this airline has.