Originally Posted by Pegasus42

I’m baffled (and annoyed) by what is effectively a more restrictive LH definition of a duplicate booking. From this thread and published LH booking and ticketing policies I understood same name, date and itinerary would be regarded as a duplicate. But no, LH is telling my partner that, despite name, date and flights being identical in two bookings made on same day, ‘each ticket was issued in a different travel class [so] these two charges cannot be considered as duplicated processing of one payment’.

Context is that my partner was making an online booking direct with LH which errored out at the payment stage. Tried again, found the price had gone up slightly, proceeded and successfully made the booking. Both bookings were then ticketed – both in Y but different fare basis for each and different PNRs - but this didn’t come to light until after 24 hrs.

Two phone calls to LH resulted in an agent’s insistence that the usual fee would be charged for refund of one of the bookings, which wasn’t acceptable. Partner flew the booked itinerary using the first booking/PNR. Now involved in a charge-back dispute involving credit card provider.

In my view this was a duplicate booking where ‘it would be logically impossible to travel’ as per the Duplicate Bookings section 2.5 of LH guidance to TAs. It’s odd that their dupe checks didn’t pick this up automatically before the flight. And now that a human has looked at the case LH has chosen not to play nice.

Is the LH stance defensible and reasonable? They are fighting the charge-back and saying it isn’t a duplicate payment because the fares are different. That seems to wilfully ignore that these are manifestly duplicate bookings. And never mind that the error stemmed from a technical fault in the booking engine on their own website.