AS - called Sunday 31 May in the morning. Agent on phone within a minute. He processed the refund on his end within a few minutes. This morning, I received an email (2 June) that my refund had been processed yesterday and to allow 3 to 5 business days to see the credit on my card. I checked my CC account, and it has already credited.

DL - After a few calls (with absurd hold or callback times), I finally got a reasonable callback time (2-ish hours) and asked for one on 12 May. I spoke with a nice agent, who "processed" the refund. I received a confirming email stating "We will make every effort to process eligible credits and refunds within 7 days. However, due to extremely high volume related to coronavirus and government-issued travel guidance, please allow up to 30 business days. Once processed, refunds may take up to two billing cycles to appear on your credit/debit card statement. Credits will appear in your account on delta.com and can also be retrieved using your ticket number." 21 days later, nothing. When I look it up on their website it shows "pending" and from the looks of it on the DL FT page, I could be waiting for quite some time.

Ouch. That is painful. Sounds like DL enjoys holding on to the money to earn them some interest. But glad to see AS doing well.

As a data point, I had a BA flight cancelled. After a 15-20 minute wait, spoke to someone in their call center. Took another 20 minutes or so, but he processed the refund of both my flight costs and seat reservation on the phone. Seat refund showed up within 48 hours on my credit card and flight about 5-7 days later. Very happy with that. Though I have heard some nightmare stories on the BA forum.

A friend of mine said she could never get through to AS the week before easter to cancel a re-scheduled flight to Mexico. I don't know how reliable she is, but she claimed she called multiple times and waited an hour+ and never got through. It wouldn't let her cancel online she claimed and she ended up doing nothing (and wasting quite a bit of money). I don't think this agrees to most of what I've heard so I'm assuming she just couldn't be bothered, waited too late, and lost her money.

There were some "peak days" right after massive cancellations and schedule changes were loaded. She could have received credit online, although I don't believe a refund, without calling. If I were her, I'd just contact AS after the fact explaining that I couldn't get through. I don't know how much the status phone numbers help in getting attention sooner rather than later.

In general Alaska has been great for refunds, except one specific case - I cancelled a flight under the waiver that had the companion code. I've been having issues getting the code back, despite alaska saying I'm eligible to get it back. I suspect the issue is that I no longer have the bank of america credit card which gave me the code, so there's some snag in re-issuing the code back to me (Alaska hasn't confirmed this is the reason but I can't think of any other reason for the delay). I still want the code back because I can use my SO's alaska credit card to buy the flight, as is required when using the code.

So if you're someone cancelling a flight with the companion code, think twice about cancelling it if you no longer have the card associated with the code.

I will also note that when I canceled with AS, the reservation canceled right away. On DL, I still have the changed reservation, ticket status is still OPEN, and I'm receiving lovely email reminders about my trip and what to expect regarding service changes.

Thanks guys! I might try and encourage her to call up and see if she can even get a travel voucher for some/all of the ticket.

That's funny. I canceled a flight three days prior to departure as I knew they were probably going to change the schedule so I would then qualify for either refund or credit. No hassles with that and the flight came off my app, however on the day of departure I got a pop up on my phone saying "Your Alaska Flight is now boarding"...yikes...no worries, all was well, just an interesting glitch.

I have canceled a few AS and Delta tickets over the last few months.

AS: all done online, requesting Wallet credit. Processed in minutes. Easy peasy

DL:

- requested one award ticket cancellation in March via Twitter. Processed without issues.

- requested a cancellation in accordance with covid waivers of a revenue ticket paid partially with gift card using online form. I asked for ecredit. Went into manual processing queue. After two weeks and no action, the day before the still-not-cancelled flight, I reached out via Twitter and got it canceled. The ecredit was allegedly issued, but due to limitations of delta.com it doesn�t appear correctly online and apparently needs to be used via a phone reservation. Not impressed with Delta.

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.

My AS requests were all done online, with wallet credit as the outcome. It was painless, while with Delta there was no way for my reservation to actually request ecredit (I put it in the notes field, but that was never read by any agent because the request was never processed). Perhaps the difference is that AS already had an automatic refund-for-wallet-credit in place for MVPG/75K travelers while Delta’s system was not set up for that?

Having said all that, now I have an AS reservation that apparently is not eligible for online cancellation. Perhaps because it went through a forced schedule/routing change (LAX-LAS turned into LAX-SEA-LAS). So Twitter here I come...

I have no experience with AS Twitter, but have had to call the 75K line for assistance in cancelling about six reservations that I couldn't change on line ... each time the agent was able to complete the transaction in probably two minutes or less (refund to credit card on two occasions, wallet credit on the others) ... still have two trips that I'm not sure about (one involving a GGU), but leaning strongly toward cancelling outright rather than rebooking

Yeah, apparently they don�t do cancellations. That at least Delta did without hesitation.

�Hi, please contact Reservations to process this refund request.�

did delta submit for refund reivew or straight refund?

I believe AS chat and text messaging (82008) can still process reservation cancellations if you're not into phone calls. Something DL does not have that I know of.