Long time lurker; many thanks for all the help and entertainment over the years.
We used Chase Ultimate Rewards Travel (CURT) to book refundable round trip flights from IND to LIM (via MIA) for upcoming travel this spring. 5 tickets in total - 432,725 points - worth about $6,500 according to Chase.
Yesterday, I called CURT to ask for a refund - we want to push the trip off to the future in light of Peru's recent instability. Talked with CURT managers on the phone for 3+ hours on two different calls yesterday, and at first I thought there was a single major issue (refundability), but in fact there appear to be two major issues. More below...
Wrinkle #1 - Refundability: Long story short, their system is showing the tickets as non-refundable. While on hold for long stretches at a time, the CURT manager would come back to share that they have to go through their rules and guidelines etc. for cancellations.
Fine, I say, but these are refundable tickets. Our confirmation email explicitly says that these are refundable tickets in at least 3 locations. We deliberately booked refundable tickets at the time of purchase.
In the fine print, under the "Refunds" header, it says "This ticket is
refundable." (their
bold emphasis, not mine).
I need to also mention that on the call, the CURT manager made an off-hand comment about AA (the airline) making a change to the ticket at some point (I didn't think of this being an issue at the time - I'm so used to flight schedule change emails that I thought nothing of her remark). Keep this in mind for later under Wrinkle #2.
My last call with CURT was their attempt to bring AA into the call. After about another 30 minutes on hold, my side of the call got dropped. No one has called me back, and I was exhausted by this point and gave up for the night.
Wrinkle #2 - Removed Return Flight: My wife and I were debating whether we could realistically make Peru work after all, and we thought we could at least marinate on it over the next day, etc. So we looked up our flight on AA, and our return flight is straight-up missing. Our confirmation email clearly shows a round trip ticket and includes a return flight. We have NEVER received any kind of notification via e-mail or otherwise about a change to our flight. I've looked up every possible keyword I could to locate an email from AA or CURT, and we have nothing.
*****
So now, I don't know how to proceed. I kindly ask for any feedback or ideas on how best to navigate this mess. And if I've done something wrong here, or misunderstand my booking, I welcome any feedback on that as well - if "refundable" means something different than what I thought it meant, please let me know. Do I call back yet another CURT manager? Do I call AA to ask about the return flight?
I fear being sent back and forth between CURT and AA with no one claiming responsibility.
Finally, is there no better quality customer service experience with CURT than to wait 3+ hours for what I think is their system(s) issue, with still no resolution? Am I crazy to have expected better? Should we look into AMEX instead for actual quality customer service?
Thanks in advance, and apologies for any posting violations.
Edit Update: In my 3rd call with a CURT manager, after 1 hour and 11 minutes more of waiting, they successfully spoke with an AA rep who said I qualified for a refund (which is great, since it was a refundable ticket). The CURT manager processed the refund and the points are already back in my account. While grateful that we got the refund we were owed, I'm not thrilled with the difficulty we had getting it processed. 4 hours of calls, 3 managers, and flight changes without notice give me pause using CURT in the future (we typically transfer to an airline anyway, so will do that going forward). All that said, I would welcome feedback on whether AMEX offers materially better customer service. Thanks again to the FT community.