Originally Posted by
wxman22
Yes, Alaska Air is great for customer service and is not the massive bureaucracy Delta has become.
Alaska also makes premium profit on the many no-competition routes it has in Alaska, so they can afford better customer service.
Since I live in one of those closed towns in Alaska, where I pay 3x more to fly to Seattle versus from KTN where DL (WestJet) also flies, I like DL because they always provide good value for my money.
Besides how often have I had call fro a refund in the last 30 years.
I don't think the AS v DL comparison here is about anything else but how each is respectively processing its refunds. From the outside, it appears that
1) AS processes each request as an actual refund, with concurrent flight cancellation and inputting the codes to process the refund. The only thing left to occur after your call with the friendly AS agent is for the reporting to reconcile and process during normal processes.
2) DL processes each request as a request for someone else to look at it and decide if you're worthy of a refund. Obvious from the email with the "case number."
This is not a refund. This is confirmation that a Refund has officially been requested and submitted for review. The flight segments aren't canceled. Nothing has been actually processed in the reservation, except a note, and reference to the refund request case number.
From the looks of it, it appears that the AS agent is empowered to see the rules, see you qualify, and start the actual refund process. It appears that the DL agent is empowered to say "you qualify" but then can't do anything about it except to send it off to another place to see if you really qualify. So, it looks like DL is spending more on the process.