Hi All,

So 2 months ago i booked a flight through lastminute.com to go to iceland-reykjavik, a straight through flight taking around 2hrs 40mins or so, including travel time on my side to the airport 1hr and roughly same once i land in iceland to the hotel so in total 4.5hrs not including waiting time in airport/security etc so all in all around 6.5hrs travel time (guesstimate)

I booked the flight about 4 weeks in advance , 3 days before my departure the Airline (icelandair) mailed me advising of a flight schedule change which basically turned it into a epic journey

My trip was a long weekend - going Friday morning 10:40am flight and landing in iceland at like 1:15pm (these are rough times from memory) and coming home Monday morning/afternoon.

The airline then changed the flight to - 10:40am fly to Copenhagen (Denmark) wait til 8pm and then get a flight to Iceland- reykjavik landing at 10:40pm and that means i get to my hotel around midnight or so. (Basically the whole of the Friday is now gone leaving me only sat and sun in Iceland and probably wrecked on Saturday due to the long travel time)

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Once i received the initial email from icelandair i rang lastminute.com on the phone and asked them what was going on, they had no record of it and said that is unusual that the airline mailed me before mailing them.....its my first time using lastminute.com so didn't know the process either.

Anyways during the call and emails following i said straight away if the flight change can not be changed back to what i booked then i want a refund as it is of no use to me the way it is.


Lastminute replied saying it can take up to 2months for a refund, and i said that seems like a long wait but it is what it is.

Today i receive a mail saying the airline refused to give me a refund and that if i want to debate i should take it up myself with the airline.

Quote:

We regret to inform you that the airline has rejected your refund request.

We kindly request you to contact the airline, as a mediator we can only request the airline for your refund. Refunds are at the discretion of the airline.




I replied to lastminute.com that i payed them not the airline and that it should be on them to follow this up not me.


Whats my play, basically it was only a couple hundred euro but to not even receive any type of air miles or anything is pi$$ take imo

The only huge wait I've ever had with dealing with any sort of airline refund was when dealing with a third party provider. Needed to do a chargeback in the end as the airline (Brussels) were so incredibly useless at replying to anything. Always try to book direct through the airline itself.

As for your play, what your departure airport is here is key, as different regs might apply

my original flight was flying from Dublin to Reykjavik (iceland) straight through no stops

which was then changed to Dublin to Copenhagen (Denmark) and then a night flight from Copenhagen (Denmark) to Reykjavik (iceland)

Chances are that both Icelandair and last minute.com will ignore you and you have to pick between letting it go and going the legal route. You can check if one of the flight rights websites wants to take over your case and pay you 70ish%. If you don’t mind ending up on the Icelandair no flight list, you can also call your credit card company to cancel the payment.

Last Fall I booked a SAS flight from Chicago to Berlin via Stockholm with a 2 hour stopover. First they changed the stopover to 6 hours, then they changed the route to Chicago - Copenhagen - Stockholm - Berlin then they added an overnight stay in Stockholm. Had booked straight through the airline and canceled within the legal window. Haven’t seen a refund from them yet.

Thanks for the info. So it seems this is a fairly common thing then (its first time i used lastminute and first time this has happened to me)

Oh well it was a couple hundred euro i will probably send random emails to lastminute asking for some type of credit note but aside from that i will just wipe it off.

I understand in small print most probably it says "we reserve the right to change flight times at our descretion" or similar, but changing a flight time the way you was advised seems crazy to me i thought mine was bad but yours is worse.



thanks

Book cheap flights and you get what you get.


Why would you use a web site called "lastminute.com" for a flight in two months?

wasnt 2 months in advance was like 3 or 4weeks i guess.

lastminute.com as far as i was aware was a big site/company. always see advertising online and TV for them, (first time i used them tbh)

but yeah i wont make mistake again just go to the airline itself

They can basically change your flights whichever way they want to. All they have to do is offer you the option to cancel if there's a significant change in your schedule.

I already knew it would be a PITA to get a refund after canceling, therefore I was willing to suck it up and accept the longer itinerary until they added the overnight stop. In hindsight I should have canceled the credit card payment but I didn't want to block myself from flying SAS in the future.

FWIW, right now I also have one of those 600€ compensation claims going because I had a severely delayed United flight from Frankfurt to Chicago. Let's see how long that ones takes to resolve. If I don't hear from United within the next couple of weeks, I'll just sell that case for 450ish€.

Sounds like they get the reservations and then let the algorithms maximize their profit at the customer's expense, with no repercussions. The modern-day business model.

Not saying that's impossible, but stuff like that is significantly less likely for businesses operating in the EU than for the US where you're allowed to F your customers whichever way you want. (Iceland isn't a EU member but part of the European Single Market)

The problem for smaller airlines that aren't part of something like Star Alliance is that they have basically no flexibility. If you're booked on United and there's a change in scheduling, odds are that you can just switch to a Lufthansa flight an hour later.

FWIW, I've traveled with Icelandair several times and have always been a very happy customer. In the past they offered the by far easiest connections for me from the US to Berlin. I was very sad to see that one getting canceled.

Much like restaurants hate grubhub, I'm sure Icelandair feels the same towards e-brokers.

The one time I flew Icelandair was a re-schedule due to Lufthansa going on strike (a whole other story). It seemed like a serviceable, low-cast airline--kind of like Frontier used to be.

This info may be out of date, but if anyone's going with them, chekc if this is still a thing. They used to have something called Saga class or fares or something. The idea was, you could bid on an upgrade. If your bid is one of the top <unused seats>, you'd pay the difference and upgrade.

As madlex mentions though, airlines have gotten so good at maximizing revenue, I imagine this is a thing of the past.

The upgrade thing with icelandair is still there as i received mails about it.

Also when i googled icelandair changed my flights theres tonnes of search results....

this isn't true- while customer service from airlines is often shitty in the US there are a ton of rules they have to follow when cancelling flights involving refunds etc and you can usually get flight credits out of them on top of it if you don't fly off the handle to the reps.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with the post I quoted and replied to?

There's no doubt that airlines have to follow rules when they cancel flights; including refunds. Everything else would be ridiculous tough. The issue is with them refunding money to your form of payment after you cancel a flight that was labeled non-refundable. That same problem exists with smaller airlines in the US.

Besides that, for domestic flights or international flights originating from the US, a lot depends on goodwill by the airline instead actual consumer laws. Prime example for that are delayed flights.
I get to Frankfurt 4 hours late from Chicago? It's up to the airline to compensate me for that.
I get to Chicago 4 hours late on my return flight from Frankfurt? The law says they owe me 600€ if the airline was at fault for the delay.

Charge back through your credit card provider so they don't get paid.
When Lastminute.com contact you about the payment tell them you are just a mediator and they will have to take it up directly with the airline.

This is relatively straight forward. Call Iceland and say "there has been a schedule change that doesn't work for me on PNR# XXXXXX, what are my options"

"I see you are still running non-stop flights DUB-KEF, I would like to be put on a non-stop rather than a connecting flight"

They really should accommodate this, it's very straight forward and there is no conspiracy here. The financial side is where it gets muddy because there are multiple entities in play. If they can't adjust your flight to make you happy, ask for a refund. If they say they can't because you didn't book with them, ask them to cancel and push the refund to the booking site. If they don't, ask last minute again, and if they don't, chargeback. But I would be surprised if youcan't get this resolved by calling icelandair. I understand you don't think you should have to, and you're right, but I doubt lastminute is going to do anything helpful so you should take this into your own hands. You can also try twitter if you don't want to call - just copy paste what I wrote in the first line.

How much was the discount going with lastminute.com vs straight through the airline?