Unrefunded fees & taxes: procedures, chargeback, small claims court?
 

I used my advantage miles to book an itinerary flying to Indonesia from LAX and back. On Nov 18th I was charged $136x2 = $272 in taxes and fees plus the miles.
Then on 9th Dec I changed the ticket to a one with fewer stops on the return leg. On 18th Dec I upgraded my outbound leg to business class and the tickets were reissued. I was charged $83.7x2 = $167.4 again in new taxes and fees and was told that I would be refunded for my previous charges.

Although the miles were reinstated immediately the $272 in taxes and fees has still not been refunded. I have called/emailed/faxed customer service several times and still haven't heard back from anyone from refunds department.

Its been two months since I have been pursuing this. The customer service(via email or phone) says that this is in hands of refunds department who can only be contacted via fax or mail. But those guys never ever respond. :(

So should I just go to small claims court ? Will that help ? Who should be the party (name & address) that I should be suing for this ?

I might be missing something, but why were the miles reinstated?

Sorry for not being thorough. When I upgraded the outbound leg to business class they had to reissue the ticket. So they first credited back the miles for the economy ticket and then booked a new ticket by charging me for the business class leg.

So when they credited the miles for economy ticket back to my account they also should have credited taxes and fees but they didn't.

Have you thought of doing a chargeback through your credit card?

No I haven't. By chargeback do you mean dispute a transaction ? Can it be done for 3 month old charges ?

Specifically for airlines, yes. I've done it in the past for the same reason.

Almost universally, yes. One of mine gives me a year.

Ok I will try this option. Thanks !

While you are correct that FCRA only provides 60 days from the date the service was rendered (or not), most CC issuers will honor that for longer periods of time, sometimes for as long as a year.

You should immediately initiate a chargeback dispute.

As a future matter, you wasted a ton of time here. When the refund did not show up, I would have sent in one request establishing a specific deadline such as 5 business days and then initiated the chargeback dispute. No reason to spend a second longer on this.

To answer your question, yes, you may sue AA. But no matter how easy your state's process is, for $272, this isn't a great use of your time.

Problem is each time I contacted them they said "Oh..you should see the refund in a week from now" or "wait a week and refunds department will contact you" .....I have had good success with AA customer service so I thought I'll wait.

Just got off the call with Citi. They said they will refund the credit back to the account within two days. All I have to do is to sign a letter they email me. Wow, I should have done that long time ago instead of trying to get this refund out of AA.

I almost exclusively use my Chase Sapphire for airline bookings because they are GREAT to deal with in disputes. I am glad you got the right resolution!

+1 to Chase Sapphire and disputes.

Not too long ago I refunded two economy class award tickets and exchanged them for business class award tickets. The miles for the economy class awards were refunded immediately, however, the international taxes were only refunded for 1 of the two tickets. Both tickets were in the same record. After well over month had passed with no further tax refunds, I sent a fax to the refunds department with a copy of the relevant portion of my credit card statement showing the refund for only 1 set of taxes and asked when the taxes for the second ticket would be refunded. I received no reply but the refund showed up on my credit card account about 10 days later.

Citi is great for this too, I've had to do it in the past.

My rule is give them 2-3 times to get it right (which is probably too nice), then dispute it. If they want to fight it, they can fight it with Citi and waste their time. If they don't dispute small amounts, guess it wasn't important to them anyway.