Originally Posted by
Often1
A CC chargeback dispute is a bad idea unless she has facts to back your assertion and she does not. Certainly disputing $1,400 when she flew the route will result in AA responding to the card issuer that the chargeback is a fraud. That may have long-term bad consequences for her.
As usual, a lot of nonsense. There's no "fraud" in charging back when a merchant doesn't provide the promised service--in fact, this is one of the specific types of problem that chargebacks were designed to address
by law. From the
Fair Credit Billing Act itself:
For the purpose of this section, a “billing error” consists of any of the following:
...
(3) A reflection on a statement of goods or services ... not delivered to the obligor or his designee in accordance with the agreement made at the time of a transaction.
So this dispute is fully in line within the relevant federal law on chargebacks. Even if the credit card issuer didn't side with the OP, there's no negative consequences to filing a bona fide chargeback. I don't know where you come up with this stuff, honestly.
She ought to start by calling AA to determine what fare basis the "downgrade" was issued at and what that fare was. You have the fare basis for the FC seat (which won't be full F).
As Dave Noble points out, the difference between $1,400 and the Y fare (which may have been all that was left at that second) is about $120. That will leave AA with a defensible position.
That's not a defensible position. In this case, it is abundantly clear what the difference between a first class ticket and the going rate for a coach ticket was both at the time of purchase and on the day of travel since the purchase of both tickets happened simultaneously, and within just a few minutes of the flight.
DL & UA do the same thing. They calculate the refund based on the best fare available at the moment, not at the time the ticket was purchased. On a short-haul, 40 minutes can make a lot of difference.
This is also not correct, at least for Delta. For downgrade compensation, Delta not only provides the fare difference
at the time of purchase, but also automatically gives an extra $200 when a downgrade occurs.