Surface Interval

Yes, and yes. It took about 3 hours to get the confirm for this mornings re-send.

kingofbeans

bsgreeson

I’m being patient and understanding with this promotion. Yes I wanted the Avios miles posted at the 10 day mark but I’m not going to lose any sleep if it takes twice or three times that to post so they can do their due diligence. Where else can I get two business class tickets from Nice, Fr to Miami, FL for $270. If it works out, which I have faith it will, I’ll be extremely happy. If not, I’m out $270 or requesting a refund. It was always a gamble for me.

I received my email from Iberia this morning requesting the identification proof and copy of the promo tickets. I sent those in and got a confirmation reply three hours later.

rje444

Anybody else receiving confirmation emails today from Iberia after sending tickets and ID document?

I haven't received any confirmation email and neither has my wife, so I'm trying to decide if I should be concerned.
We both sent them last night, and when we had received no reply early this morning we sent them again at 7AM est.

david_oz

I was a victim of their IT issues. I ended up creating multiple accounts because I received an error that my passport number was incorrect (I re-tried with three different passport numbers - I have three citizenships). In the meantime, Iberia was creating each account despite the error, and I only realized this after checking my email and seeing multiple "welcome to Iberia" emails. This morning, I received this from Iberia:

Dear customer,
We have noticed that several Iberia Plus accounts have recently been registered in your name. For your security, we have cancelled the duplicated accounts, leaving the original and oldest one active. You can continue to enjoy all the benefits of the programme through this account. Likewise, if you took part in the 9,000 bonus Avios promotion for purchasing at Iberia.com from 21 to 24 June 2018, we will record the relevant Avios to your account. If you have purchased a ticket associated with the cancelled account and would like a refund or would like to perform any other transaction regarding it, please contact us via email at [email protected], including your Iberia Plus number in the subject line and stating:
Ticket number to be refunded (you can see the number in your confirmation email, starting 075-…).
Iberia Plus number associated with the ticket.
You may request a refund for the ticket at no extra cost until 31 July 2018 (GMT+2).

After receiving this email, I was able to login and recover one of the accounts, but not the account I used to book the tickets. I emailed again with:

Dear Sir / Madam

My Iberia account is currently locked. Please see attached for the form to unblock the account. During the registration process, Iberia's site gave me an error saying my passport number was not acceptable. I tried with three passport numbers (I have three citizenships) and all three gave me an error, however despite this error Iberia created multiple accounts in my name. I only became aware of this after checking my email. I booked 10 tickets (also attached) through your 9,000 avios promotion using the Iberia account XXXXXXX, which was the final account created under my name. I received an email this morning from Iberia saying this account was cancelled, and the only account which was retained is YYYYYY.

Could you please transfer my bookings to YYYYYY and award the avios under this account. I am also requesting for you to unblock the account YYYYYYY.

Thank you very much for your help.

No auto-reply yet. As a data point, I signed up on Friday June 21st at 8:15pm Mountain Time. The difference between the email confirming my first account and my last account was 14 minutes, and 396 account numbers. My girlfriend signed up 2 hours later and hers was 2,970 account numbers higher than my last one. So including duplicate accounts, they must be dealing with a ton of volume, especially since the promotion became more popular as the weekend progressed!


In response to some of the comments above, there is no doubt they blew it on this one. You can talk all you want about how people opening a new account and booking 10 low-cost flights will never be good customers, but that misses the point for two reasons:

1. Their terrible systems, communication and management of this promotion caused a bad impression with valuable customers, as well as non-valuable customers. There are tons of people on this thread who booked 3 or 4 flights to various destinations which they fully intend to fly, and now will probably never book with Iberia again. These customers were a target of the promotion and now are probably wary of interacting with Iberia's terrible IT and customer service again
2. Those who booked 10 low-cost flights might be taking advantage of Iberia's generosity today, but they could certainly become customers tomorrow. I will never be a high-value customer to Iberia, and they might not recover the cost of the promotion through my business, but I still might have become a customer. Good experiences with a brand promote loyalty, repeat business, and referrals. The backbone of any business is making sure your customers have a positive, consistent experience with the brand. A large set of low-value customers can still be a positive contributor to the airline in the future, even if they don't recover the cost of the promotion.

frenchft

criced

Was it news for you that a spanish airline are really slow and byroctratic? 😆

DELLAS

Hopefully you get it resolved and they do post the AVIOS to your account as it sounds a genuine issue/error. Hopefully they will see it as that. Sadly because IB did get a large volume of scammers it has delayed things for genuine people. The difference in your case is that you have conducted yourself without multiple posts of crazy rants and drama queen style DYKWIA!

c1223

Obviously you lot don't know what Spanish IT is like. Have a read about the issues TSB had.

Adam1222

Got my points, booked a CX reward no problem. Easily one of the best windfall promotions I've taken a risk on. I know a lot of people are still dealing with drama, but that's kind of the inherent risk in taking advantage of any "too good to be true" promotion. I see no evidence of fraud or deception by IB, and urge those who are going on about that to think twice, as it's not going to get you the points.
As for those people who are pretending that though they have not had an Iberia account in the past, but Iberia should be concerned about the potential value of them as a customer, let's be honest- the chances of you being a customer of any value to Iberia are slim to none. You may fly a short haul flight if you get to Spain sometime in the next few years, but you probably would fly IB or Vueling no matter what, because you are price-sensitive and they serve the most non-stop markets in Spain. Every time there's a promotion that's widely advertised on blogs, people come out of the woodwork who have no prior experience with the company, something happens that disappoints them, and then they rant about customer service as if they ever had any intention of being a paying customer.
The number of people who will "never fly Iberia again" and actually had an intent to pay is miniscule. People being loud and entitled is often what leads to promotions *not* being honored.

david_oz

thanks for the compliment. I have to admit there have been some really funny posts here in the last few days. the irony is I've been an occasional Iberia customer in the past (always credited points to BA or QF so never had an IB account), I did my MBA in Madrid, and will be a regular visitor there for the rest of my life. So even those of us who are "taking advantage" of the promotion have the possibility to become a long-term customer.

chejus

jspira

I agree with you about the promotion - and I disagree with you about your English as your mastery of English is far better than many here who speak English as a first language.

C17PSGR

Obviously, they had not thought through the unexpected consequences of the promotion. Once they realized it, they could have tried to figure out a way out of it, but they didn't.

It appears that they ultimately decided to see if they could pare down their exposure by asking new accounts to verify they were real. I assume this was the major focus in IB's HQ for the past few days with lots of meetings and emails. So, while I would liked to have had the miles in my account already, I'm not shocked or particular disappointed but more impressed they didn't try to get out of this. And, I'm a Oneworld Emerald who has flown on IB a couple of times but credited it to my AA account.

gnargel

Fully agree that Iberia is handling this very very well. Got my 90.000 avios.

But what I do not understand is why they just didn't end the promo early. It appears they got bombarded with emails, calls and tweets during the promotion period so they must have been aware that the promo got way more exposure than they probably expected. But instead of ending the promo early, they kept sending out positive messages (no need to actually fly, etc. etc.).

Also, I know 90.000 avios for less than EUR 300 is a very very good deal, but many many people in the US got the British Airways credit card a couple of years ago that costs $ 80 a year and after spending $ 3000 awarded 100.000 avios.