Yet another example of dealing with Iberia
- May 18. I booked flights with Iberia Edinburgh- Gatwick-Madrid-Granada for Feb 19
- 3 days later received an email from Iberia saying EDI-LGW flight cancelled - no reason given. The flight still appearedg on Iberia, BA (operating the flight), and all travel agents websites.
- Contacted Customer Services who were no use at all. Typical response was 'it must be cancelled, the email says so'. If you try to escalate the issue they just put the phone down on you. Eventually I asked them to cancel the other two legs. Initially they said that since it was a nonrefundable booking I would receive no refund. I pointed out to them that the yhad cancelled a component of the flight and they eventually agreed that I should be refunded. They said it would take about two weeks for the refund to come through.
- I then booked the same flights through a travel agent
- No refund after 3 weeks so I opened a complaint via www.resolver.com which eventualy escalated up to CEO Iberian Airways. I had two responses, one saying 'sometimes events occur outside our control and we hope it has not put you off flying with us again'. The second was a survey asking how I felt they had dealt with my complaint.
- Aug 18 I also put in the same complaint through the Iberian website. I got back the same email as above.
- Sept 18 Still no money so decided to go to the Small Claims Court. Rang customer services to give them official notification of what I intended to do. I received the refund 5 days later.
There is more - much more!
- 3 days before flying I received an email from the airline saying the LGWf to MAD flight had been switched to a LHR to MAD flight with no suggestion on how I was to get from LGW to LHR in less than 2 hours.
- The agent received the same informationand managed to switch me to a EDI to LHR flight for no charge
- Following day received another email from Iberia saying that because of a plane change they had to move my seat booking. This was for the now non-existent LGW-MAD flight
- Flight day. I got to LHR ok but the onward flight turned back on taxiing to the runway with a hydraulic problem which turned out to be unrepairable. Put on a later flight to Madird and later flight to Granda and got there 7 hours late.
- The agent happily volunteered to put in a compensation claim on my behalf. I said to myself -' best of luck'
- In March Iberia requested my bank details and I supplied them.
- I got an email from the agent in May saying he had heard nothing further from Iberia and he had rung them up and spent 2 hours being passd from one person to another and got nowhere.
- I decided to take up the challenge myself. I raised a compensation request 10 weeks ago and have heard nothing. Looking on their website you can see the status of the request. It is both 'being resolved' and 'closed'.
- It is now with the CAA. Watch this space.