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Short form: the airline I'm traveling on managed to mess up every leg of my round trip (international trip), ultimately costing me most of a day at each end and also some money for expenses along the way. I'm not interested in vouchers, as I rarely fly and when I do why would I trust this carrier again?

What is the best strategy for obtaining financial compensation? Or is that just the way the world works now and I'm out of luck?

Longer form (per request in comments): they sold me an itinerary that was tighter than they claimed, the first plane was late, they rebooked the missed flight with a two-leg one, the first of those was late, and I arrived about 16 hours late. On the return trip the first flight was delayed 8 hours for a proposed ultimate delay of about 15 hours; I think I have that down to 10 after rebooking but I'm not home yet so we'll see. I will have had about $125 in incidental expenses because of the delay, and the ticket price was about $1700. Airline is Air Canada.

Blog posts with gory details: http://cellio.livejournal.com/930425.html and http://cellio.livejournal.com/931959.html . The urgency alluded to in the latter is a family medical situation that came up just before I was due to leave anyway. (It is only because of that that I got the less-late flight.)

Gayot Fow
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Monica Cellio
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1 Answers1

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Definitely talk to their customer relations people. While I've never had any reason to talk to their customer service, this is the kind of thing that their customer service employees are paid to handle. Definitely emphasize the travel delays, the incidental expenses that were incurred, and the fact that they booked you on tight connections. Also, look at their customer service statement. If you find inconsistency between their actions and stated policies, that gives you leverage for your complaint.

If you can only wrangle a voucher, don't lose hope—you can sometimes use vouchers to book flights on other airlines in the same alliance as Air Canada (Star Alliance, airlines like United and Lufthansa) so you wouldn't have to fly with AC again.

Side note: a few credit cards, especially airline branded and "premium" (think American Express Platinum, business cards, and the like) let you claim a rebate for up to $x amount of travel-related incidentals—check on that.

redct
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