My first time on Emirates, booked flights for a family of four from Rio de Janeiro to Bangkok. Had plans to do a stopover in Dubai so I read carefully the stopover section on their website and there it says (update: used to say) "booking your stopover in Dubai is very simple. Once you have confirmed and paid for your Emirates flight, contact your travel agent or local Emirates office". Well, what do I understand from that? That I am supposed to book my flight, pay for it, credit card, etc, and then - only then - get back to Emirates and ask for the stopover.
Following instructions, I made contact and was very surprised to find that in order to book my stopover I would have to pay the alteration fee of $150 per passenger plus fee difference. Total of about 1000 dollars. WTH?
Called customer service here in Brazil, but it was like a joke. Asked the person to read what their website says both in english and portuguese but the reply was that "they do not have access to the Emirates website". Right.
Wrote to Emirates in Dubai and did not get a reply at first. Resent the email and got a reply quoting a different section of the website where, below the quoted instruction I pasted here, it's written that passengers are encouraged to book the stopover while purchasing their flights so as to not incur in extra fees. But the first sentence contradicts the sentence, and the first one clearly said to pay first, call later. And in my book, first things first, right?
Complained again to Emirates in writing and they again refused to budge and quoted the same area of the website, which to my great surprise (or maybe not) was rewritten.
I am pretty seriously angry at Emirates, which is supposed to be this great airline. You go and spend 5k on tickets for your family, a large part of it non-refundable, promise your sons they will see Legoland and the tallest building in the world, only to find you're being scammed to fork an extra 1k.
Anybody else had the same issue?