Originally Posted by
Flame3601
Firstly sorry to hear about your mother, that is very sad, hopefully she died peacefully ? We had a friend in a similar situation with EK , he was randomly brutally attacked in broad daylight by someone with a machete in Cape Town. To cut along story short , after 2 weeks in ICU along with the trauma of going through such an event he was thus unable to travel on his EK flights and requested a full refund due to what happened. EK really stuck their foot in it and said they would only refund him if he was dead- which really hit home for him. A bit like in your case no compassion or any regard for feelings , a pure copy and paste response that was not thought through. Even thou he knew he would not get a refund due to the contract in place , it was worth a shot for him , but he was not expecting such a blunt reply.
While understandably frustrating I'd like us to differentiate this. From the OP's post, and we don't have all details yet, it is not clear that EK has done anything wrong or contrary to their terms, in fact some might be surprised there was a refund at all as a one-way could easily have cost more. Your friend's case while sad is a case for travel insurance and EK did nothing wrong, you can't expect them to be able to empathize with emotional trauma when they have tens of millions of pax a year. EK's conditions of carriage and fare rules explicitly reference and make provision for refunds in case of death or death of a direct relative, not so for injury or physical inability to travel.