Dovster

Way back when my daughter was 13 (she is now in her 30s) I made reservations on LY for a trip with her to Europe. Friends of mine in Germany threw a bat mitzah party for her -- and a few days in advance EL cancelled the flight and gave us reservations on a different one two days later.

My friends had to rush to change their own plans for the party and I more or less left LY and starting flying SkyTeam airlines instead. (I did make a handful of LY flights.)

This year, I decided to go back to LY and, since May, have made 4 Biz Class r/ts. I had another reservation for December -- the 13th to the 20th of December.

A friend from the US decided to join me there and bought her plane ticket on Delta (non-refundable). We both made hotel reservations. About 90 minutes ago I got an e-mail from LY telling me that my flight has been changed and I will be flying on the 15th instead of the 13th. My return flight on the 20th was left unchanged.

I don't want to fly for only 5 days and I held on the phone for a full hour waiting to speak with someone there. All I ever got was a recording. I may change my return flight or I might ask for a refund and fly on Alitalia instead.

In cases like this, will LY refund my money?

joshwex90

The "Tibi Law" requires them to refund you fully (with no further compensation)

http://rotbaumlaw.com/2013/09/%D7%97...8%D7%99%D7%A1/
http://eng.rotbaumlaw.com/2013/12/flight-cancellation/

Dovster

Thank you. There is an outbound flight two days earlier than I had planned. Will LY agree to put me on it at no extra charge?

Ditto

It never hurts to ask, if they have available seats they might agree to that.
With AZ you get the normal European J seating, i.e. normal seat with the middle seat blocked and no IFE.
From a recent experience FCO-TLV, the food and service were good but probably not really worth the extra money, so you might as well just get the money refunded and book AZ in Y

Dovster

Yesterday, I spent hours trying to reach LY Customer Service. I was NOT given the option of having them call me back.

Today, I was given that option, they called back about an hour later, and I was able to dump the 15 December flight, which was useless for me, and fly on 11 December instead. As my original flight was for 13 December, this will cost me for two more nights in my Venice hotel. I could have switched to AZ but, as noted above, its Biz Class is really no different than Economy.

There are some other problems with AZ as well. It requires a connection in FCO and, when I took it last year, it was so late leaving VCE that I had a mad dash through the terminals to get to my plane. I would prefer not chancing that again. Moreover, AZ does not allow you to reserve a seat until 24 hours before the flight.

NYTA

Changing at FCO is usually a nightmare and domestic to international usually worse as the outbound passport lines are terribly understaffed.