Dear Tripped Up,
Last Feb. 18, I headed to Toronto Pearson International Airport with a reservation to fly on Air Canada to Frankfurt and then on its Star Alliance partner Lufthansa to Málaga, Spain, for a two-week vacation. (My return would basically follow the reverse route on the same airlines but leave from Barcelona.) My Toronto-to-Frankfurt flight was delayed about two hours, meaning I would miss my connection. So I was relieved that before I even landed in Frankfurt, Air Canada had rebooked me to Málaga via Lisbon on TAP Air Portugal, another Star Alliance member. I had a great trip — that is, until I got to the Barcelona airport at 3:50 a.m. for my return flight and an agent at the Lufthansa counter told me that Air Canada had “suspended” my flight to Frankfurt because I missed my original connection two weeks earlier. They told me to call Air Canada, which I did — repeatedly — starting at around 5:30 a.m. Alas, an automated message told me that I should try later “due to high call volume.” By noon, I had given up and purchased my own flight home (on TAP) for 1,138 Canadian dollars, about $830 at the time. I filed a reimbursement request with Air Canada but received a flurry of confusing emails, including one that said I was ineligible for compensation, another that said I would receive “the refundable portion of the taxes for the segment of your trip that you didn’t fly” and two follow-up emails with entirely different calculations (842 and 212 Canadian dollars, neither of which I got). Can you help? Carol, Toronto
Dear Carol,
You were the victim of a double whammy: a frustrating rule (no-show for one leg of an itinerary and lose the rest) that was enforced on someone who did not even break it (because Air Canada should have canceled your Lufthansa leg when it rerouted you).
Actually, let’s add a third whammy: the comically bad customer service you received.
I got in touch with Angela Mah, an Air Canada spokeswoman, whose email response noted that while you did actually receive a 212 dollar tax refund in June (you said you later found it in your statement), the airline will reimburse you the remaining 926 dollars you requested.
“A ticketing issue occurred,” she wrote. “As a result, the remaining portion of her itinerary, including her return flight, was incorrectly canceled.” English teachers in Canada and beyond will recognize this construction as the blame-dodging passive voice.
“We are also reviewing internally with our agents and our call center agents so that we can improve in the future,” she continued. (The airline is also giving you 10,000 Aeroplan points as a “good-will gesture.”)
Let’s go through this whammy by whammy.
No. 1: You got hit by the no-show rule.
I hear all the time from people left in the lurch because they get stuck behind a jackknifed tractor-trailer on the way to the airport and miss a plane by five minutes, or decide to extend a layover in Rome by a few days, skipping their scheduled flight to Paris and taking a train instead, unintentionally canceling their flight home.
Airlines have their reasons for automatically canceling the rest of travelers’ itineraries when they don’t show up for early legs, most notably to discourage skiplagging. This is a tactic in which passengers game pricing algorithms by tacking on unneeded flight legs that, in the inscrutable world of airline booking, somehow lower their fare. But couldn’t airlines at least text and give fliers a chance to explain before canceling the rest of their trips? Such a courtesy would have saved you here.
No. 2: You didn’t even break the no-show rule.
Yes, Air Canada’s rebooking system predicted your missed connection and rerouted you as you crossed the Atlantic, but somehow Lufthansa never found out about the new itinerary.
“Lufthansa was not involved in the rebooking or ticket changes,” Christina Semmel, a spokeswoman for Lufthansa, wrote me via email. Ms. Mah, of Air Canada, did not respond to my question about how the screw-up had occurred. The only clue we have is that an Air Canada representative blamed “human error” while apologizing in a call to you.
I called Brian Rodkey, a retired Delta manager whose team worked with partner airlines on “reaccommodation” — what carriers call the process of rescheduling passengers after canceled flights or missed connections — to help explain.
“‘Reaccom’ is fraught with lots of issues because the underlying reservation can have hundreds of idiosyncratic things that have to be processed smoothly,” he said, “and sometimes it can hit a hiccup.” Communications systems developed for partner airlines to communicate with one another are imperfect, he noted, and in a time crunch, messages can slip through the cracks.
But your emails show that Air Canada had almost six hours from the time it rerouted you to the time you no-showed. Considering I’ve been sending messages instantly around the world ever since I got an AOL account in 1994, that strikes me as more than enough time.
No. 3: Customer service didn’t serve you.
The screenshots of your repeated, unsuccessful calls from the Barcelona airport to Air Canada — 21, I counted — are enough to trigger anyone who has tried and failed to reach a human at a big corporation. To be fair, Toronto was hit with a winter storm that day. That might have prevented staff from getting to work or caused disruptions and cancellations that jammed the phone lines. But Air Canada should hardly be unprepared for winter weather in February. You were certainly right to take matters into your own hands and buy your own ticket on TAP.
Airlines generally hate it when customers pay their own way out of a problem and then seek reimbursement later. Sometimes they’re right: Travelers have an obligation to show reasonable patience while standing in airport lines or waiting on hold after disrupted flights. But you were patient enough. The airline should have promptly paid you the 1,138 dollars.
Instead, you got (and shared with me) a series of disjointed responses, as different agents answered questions you didn’t ask, messed up basic facts and sent you two different refund calculations on the same day without explanation.
For example, one email blamed you for the airline’s mistake, noting, “It is the responsibility of the customer to contact the airline prior to the flight departure should she decide not to take her booked flight.” In an added blunder, it said your no-show occurred on your return trip in March, not your outgoing trip in February.
The confusing email that you said denied you compensation was actually informing you that you were not owed money under Canadian rules that require airlines to compensate passengers when flights are delayed, because the delay was necessary for passenger safety. But you had not even asked for such compensation.
Six weeks later, you received those two emails, hours apart, alerting you that you would be getting a refund for 842 — no, make that 212 — dollars in taxes. I dived into the documents’ details, and it appears the original 842 dollar figure was a miscalculation. The 212 dollars was closer, but also incorrect: the wrong amount refunded for the wrong reason.
Though you did not make any mistakes here (except missing that 212 dollar refund on your credit card statement), your story does offer some lessons for passengers who may find themselves in a similar situation: First, if you skip a leg of an itinerary, let the airline know as soon as possible and ask it not to cancel your later flights. Second, whenever any disruption to your travels results in an itinerary change, keep an eye on all your remaining flights to make sure nothing else was affected. Open the airline app or site, log in with your account number or confirmation code, and make sure all the legs you reserved are still there. If one or more are missing, or if you suddenly find yourself unable to check in before a flight, don’t chalk it up to a technical error. Call the airline right away. If you’re lucky, you’ll get through in well under 21 tries.
If you need advice about a best-laid travel plan that went awry, send an email to [email protected].
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