srodr

Recently a friend of mine did a voluntary bump and was given a $400 voucher (only after they offered $150 and my friend pointed out their written policy of 400 for voluntary bumps). When she tried to use it towards two $250 tickets for her and her daughter, she was told that only her ticket was covered by the voucher and the remaining $150 dollars of the voucher would be lost. This is a very misleading way of handling bumps.

cab747

This has always been F9 policy, and I am fairly confident to say that no F9 agent would tell the passenger they get the residual value back on the voucher.

As for the value of the voucher, it is based on the difference between your scheduled and new arrival time. The greater the delay in your new arrival time, the greater the voucher amount, capped at $400.

srodr

The agent really should have explained this up front. But to be honest, this agent was new and very confused on the whole bump compensation procedure. In fact, the plane had already departed before my friend was actually offered the $400 voucher. She had initially approached this agent and said that she would consider volunteering if the flight was overbooked, but there was never an actual agreement because the agent never got back to my friend until after her seat had been given away and the gate was closed! That was the point that she called me, and I told her to insist upon the $400 voucher since she was essentially an involuntary bump.

cab747

What was the routing? What was the reprotection? What was the original arrival time and the new one?

I do agree with you however, the offer should have been made quite clear as assumptions can lead to potential problems.

srodr

The routing was SAN-DEN and her delay was just over 2 hours.

Besides my friend, several other passengers were invol-bumped, and the agent was also trying to short change all of them with $200 vouchers. My friend went to their defense and got most of them the $400. The agent's argument included the point that since the original flight had been delayed about an hour, the bumps were only due the <2hr compensation of $200. She relented in the end and gave those that were still there $400 vouchers.

Unfortunately I had forgoten to mention to my friend that the compensation could be requested in cash rather than a voucher. This didn't seem as important until she found out when trying to redeem it that she would only be able to use $250 of it.

srodr

Oh, and one more thing that I learned...

It was only after the fact that my research turned up the new DOT bump rules of $400<2hrs; $800>2hrs. I wish I had known that at the time!

sbm12

Those numbers are for IDBs, not VDBs.

srodr

Yes, like I said, she was in my mind at least an invol since she never actually agreed to give up her seat. In any case, all the others were definite invols.

FCfree

If ever given the option between cash and a voucher, take cash! You can always spend cash back at the airline who gave it to you... Or at another airline... Or on anything else you want. There are no doubts with cash.

I've never personally had this problem on Frontier, but I once got a VDB on TWA for a "free ticket anywhere we fly in the CONUS." When I got the ticket there was a lot of fine print about what fare classes it could be used on. After a lot of fighting with TWA, I finally was able to use it over Memorial Day weekend.

Its very hard to find out all the T&C of a VDB voucher, especially when agents are trying to get a full flight away from the gate.