A few years ago I booked a trip to the UK to visit some friends. The morning I was supposed to leave, I get an email from one of my friends saying that I should check if my flight is still on, because there is "something going on with a volcano in Iceland". Turns out it's the start of that major eruption and all air traffic in Northern Europe is grounded with no foreseeable reopening.
I first called the airline, Virgin Atlantic. They were very friendly, apologetic, and as helpful as possible. They said they could reschedule me, but given all the unknowns they weren't making any new bookings for at least 2 weeks. Now this was a two week vacation I was taking, with lots of other things scheduled, so I couldn't really just up and shift the whole thing two weeks on a whim. They would have gladly given a refund, but since I booked through Expedia, I had to talk to them. That's when things started going downhill.
First of all, even on what I'm sure was a crazy customer service day, the people at Virgin answered the phone in minutes and were quite friendly. The Expedia call took almost an hour to be answered. Every agent I spoke too was borderline rude and confrontational, and had the worst broken English of any oversees call center I've dealt with. From the start they only wanted to argue, that because it was the day of the flight, I could neither cancel or reschedule. Finally, after about 90 minutes of arguing and being transferred, I got to a high enough manager who actually seemed to listen to what I said and not just be reading a script, and got my refund authorized. And I thought it was over.
Months go by and the credit never appears back to my card. I call Expedia a couple times, each time they say it is being processed by the CC company, but it can take up to 90 days. I check with the CC, they have no record of the credit. Finally after 90 days, I get a hold of Expedia and they say it is fine if I just have the CC company cancel the transaction on their end (as a dispute), as there must have been a "glitch" somewhere. And that flipped the trouble switch.
Apparently there is an automated system in Expedia, if you dispute their charge with you CC company, they automatically flip it to a collections agency. A few months after I did, I got a very threatening letter and phone call saying I owed the charge plus penalties and interest. If I did not pay, they would flag my credit rating and possibly take further legal action. I contacted Expedia again to ask WTF is going on, and their response was that they are not allowed to communicate with the collections agency once the matter has been given to them. They were confident that if i just explained why I didn't owe the money, the collections guys would drop it. But they couldn't provide me with any documentation to give them.
After another month of letters and phone calls with the collections agents, and quite a bit of stress on my end, I stopped hearing from them so I guess it was resolved.
Keep in mind, all told this is about 8 months down the road from when I was originally supposed to travel. In fact I rebooked the entire trip for about a month after the original, and had already gone and come back. But definitely not with Expedia.
Totally an aside, but if you're in the US and there's a collections agency after you for a bogus debt, it's easy to make them go away: Send them a formal dispute letter under the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act and advise them not to contact you further. If they do anyway, you can sue them for punitive damages.
It's actually a pretty nice, common sense law. Note that if you intend to dispute the charge, you should move quickly: there's a 30 day limit from first notice.
This is an interesting piece of information, thanks! Up in Canada I have heard of stories where debt collectors will call a "John Smith", ask them for their DOB, and SIN, type that information into their debt file (which does not have this information) and make them pay. I wonder if there's similar legislation in Canada.
Good point. Though sending a certified letter disputing a debt to a first-party collections department isn't going to hurt you even if it isn't binding.
I doubt that there's a EU-wide norm for that yet, but in Germany, what you do is completely ignore anything the collection agency does by itself after you first tell them you think the claim is invalid. What you must not by any means ignore is the Mahnbescheid (a court notice of the claim) - reply to that immediately that you contest the claim. In most cases that will be the last thing you hear, since they'll then have to actually sue you and prove the validity of the claim to a court.
Something similar happened to me once. I rented a car with Alamo through Expedia at Chicago ORD, pick up around 11:30 pm. My flight was a bit late, and when I got there the Alamo counter was closed. It turned out they closed at midnight. It was impossible to pick up a car from Alamo.
I called Expedia. They told me to rent a car from Hertz and pay for it, they'd pay for it. When I called Expedia on subsequent days nobody knew anything about this conversation. They refused to pay for my rental, and said that if I could prove that Alamo was closed they would refund the original rental. Of course it would be a long and tedious process.
It wasn't worth my time, so I forgot about it. Never used Expedia again.
To be fair, your flight being late is something that your travel insurance company should deal with. If airlines and travel industries had to subsidise late flights and erratic weather patterns they may go out of business. Get travel insurance, it's affordable (but read the fine print, some may have over $100 excess which makes such incidents not claimable).
That depends if Expedia inform the correct closing time of Alamo or not, I had the same problem but Expedia say that the renting car company was open 24 hours and it wasn´t
It was an Expedia vacation package (Flight + Hotel + Car) and the confirmation email said "24-hour counter." I had that conversation with the agents, that's what they said they'd refund the rental. They wouldn't bother to verify that the counter closed at midnight, I was the one who had to do all the legwork and prove it. I'm sure they were legally required to refund me regardless. They were betting that it wouldn't be worth my time to keep calling and pestering them, and they were right.
That is crazy. I've never heard of a CC credit taking up to 90 days to process, I think they just pulled that out of their ass. Also, the idea that a company would advise you to authorize a dispute/chargeback is pretty amazing (read: ridiculous). I have a fair amount of experience in this space and to me these things just shout incompetence.
A few years ago I booked a trip to the UK to visit some friends. The morning I was supposed to leave, I get an email from one of my friends saying that I should check if my flight is still on, because there is "something going on with a volcano in Iceland". Turns out it's the start of that major eruption and all air traffic in Northern Europe is grounded with no foreseeable reopening.
I first called the airline, Virgin Atlantic. They were very friendly, apologetic, and as helpful as possible. They said they could reschedule me, but given all the unknowns they weren't making any new bookings for at least 2 weeks. Now this was a two week vacation I was taking, with lots of other things scheduled, so I couldn't really just up and shift the whole thing two weeks on a whim. They would have gladly given a refund, but since I booked through Expedia, I had to talk to them. That's when things started going downhill.
First of all, even on what I'm sure was a crazy customer service day, the people at Virgin answered the phone in minutes and were quite friendly. The Expedia call took almost an hour to be answered. Every agent I spoke too was borderline rude and confrontational, and had the worst broken English of any oversees call center I've dealt with. From the start they only wanted to argue, that because it was the day of the flight, I could neither cancel or reschedule. Finally, after about 90 minutes of arguing and being transferred, I got to a high enough manager who actually seemed to listen to what I said and not just be reading a script, and got my refund authorized. And I thought it was over.
Months go by and the credit never appears back to my card. I call Expedia a couple times, each time they say it is being processed by the CC company, but it can take up to 90 days. I check with the CC, they have no record of the credit. Finally after 90 days, I get a hold of Expedia and they say it is fine if I just have the CC company cancel the transaction on their end (as a dispute), as there must have been a "glitch" somewhere. And that flipped the trouble switch.
Apparently there is an automated system in Expedia, if you dispute their charge with you CC company, they automatically flip it to a collections agency. A few months after I did, I got a very threatening letter and phone call saying I owed the charge plus penalties and interest. If I did not pay, they would flag my credit rating and possibly take further legal action. I contacted Expedia again to ask WTF is going on, and their response was that they are not allowed to communicate with the collections agency once the matter has been given to them. They were confident that if i just explained why I didn't owe the money, the collections guys would drop it. But they couldn't provide me with any documentation to give them.
After another month of letters and phone calls with the collections agents, and quite a bit of stress on my end, I stopped hearing from them so I guess it was resolved.
Keep in mind, all told this is about 8 months down the road from when I was originally supposed to travel. In fact I rebooked the entire trip for about a month after the original, and had already gone and come back. But definitely not with Expedia.