Originally Posted by
stevendorechester
I would have asked for a reroute on a different airline. If I remember their contact of carriage does allow for a reroute in situations where a class of service is no longer available. I' ve had no problems getting rerouted instead of a dowgrade.
You have to push for it. Most low-level airline employees do their jobs very well but sometimes you get a lazy one and in this case you need to elevate this to a manager.
Just send a polite letter asking for a refund of 75% of your one-way fare. AC should respond quickly.
I did ask if there were other options (and the agent did check) but all flights out of LIS to North America were full, and it was too late to reroute via another European hub (flight departs LIS at 1250). I had to back by today so wasn't able to postpone for another day.
Crappy situation. I would also be upset.
One thing I wouldn't do is assume luggage tags or 'teenagers" somehow matters... it has no relevance... and in my opinion sheds a bit of DYKWIA.
I also don't agree that AC should move PY clients to Y to accomodate clients who were dowgraded from J. If Ac did that they would now have twice as many claims for that flight.
For me , the biggest issue is tha being SE and 75k would lead one to believe that you would be further down the pecking order of those being downgraded. that's the issue ... AC handled this poorly.
Downgrades happen . but in this case i believe that, easilly, other passengers with less status or fare type etc would have been a better choice. [ ie ;logical]
I agree with the comments about not assuming who the other "more worthy" passengers were, and did not include that in my message to AC Customer Relations. It just irked me that there were people in the cabin who, to my untrained eye, appeared to have lower status than my wife. I definitely felt the DYKWIA coming on; I don't like to flaunt my status to airline staff, but in this case did not feel we were being treated the way that higher status passengers should be treated by an airline.
Originally Posted by
capedreamer
What a crappy situation. I'd be pissed too.
Everyone is (probably correcting) pointing to the incompetence of contract ground staff at outstations, but what I'm wondering is why the reseating following an equipment sub wouldn't be handled centrally, either by a computer or HQ staff?
The central system is the one that sent an automatic email telling me I was rebooked into PY and gave me a new seat assignment in Y. Clearly a system fail.