Two years passed, still no Automatic Refund calculations and processing. In the world of AI and technology, I wonder if airlines do it intentionally to reduce number of refund requests? Or its incompetence and ancient workflows that they are afraid to touch?

I did rough calculations based on

• 4% refund requests
• 50 million pax per year (should have used number of tickets, but this data is not available)
• 2 minutes average processing time per request
• 70% agent load factor
• 8 hour work day
• 1500$ per month salary
• 500$ per month per agent benefits, office space, training etc

=> Approximately 35 agents, 70,000$ per month.

And think its a very conservative estimate. If agents have to manually look up fare rules and verify all sorts of things, this can be easily 2X or 4X more. I will be happy to implement automatic cancellation feature for Emirates and setup ongoing IT support for it for a fraction of this cost.