cockpitvisit

Just called Lufthansa to cancel a cheap ticket and get the taxes back. They tried charging me a 30EUR administrative fee for that. After my protest, the agent spoke with her supervisor for 5 minutes and agreed to waive the fee on this occasion, because I purchased the ticket before the fee was introduced.

Trying a dummy booking on lufthansa.com, there is indeed a new sentence "An administrative fee may be charged for refunds" well hidden under Additional Fare Information (there is nothing about it in the Cancellation line). The new fee applies to refunds of fees and taxes for tickets with the fare below 150EUR.

According to the agent, the fee does not apply when cancelling a ticket within 24 hours of the online booking.

Don't know if this is old news already.

oliver2002

Thats the new RSC. Silently introduced but never enforced so far... interesting they apply it in these difficult market conditions.

Another reason not to buy from LH.de

Rambuster

I would strongly refuse to pay the RSC for tickets purchased before June 3rd, when this fee seems to have gone into effect with reference to their T&Cs at time of purchase.

paffendorf

Probably many carriers have not yet realized what's going on... Maybe they want to see how many pax they can lose.

CalFlyer

When exactly were these new rules introduced? Any source for the date? I have a €99 ticket booked in May 2009 that I need to cancel, and I want to be prepared.

DTS

Does this only apply to tickets booked on LH.de? I usually buy from lh.com Ireland, no RSC shown when I just checked.

cockpitvisit

After you choose the flights and click Continue, the RSC is shown in the 4th line of Additional Fare Information under Fare Rules.

It appears on lufthansa.ie as well, at least for me. Are you using an Irish proxy server?

crossings

Charging a refund services charge makes LH more similar to Low Cost Carriers. What's next? Charges for checked in baggage? Pay per use for restrooms in the plane?

Again I will contact LH on all channels that are open to me and let them know about my disappointment. Of course I'll use alternative carriers instead of LH in Europe whenever possible until this is resolved. Also I hope that someone will challenge this 30 Euro fee since actual costs for a cancellation are most probably much lower.

Tim2008

This was to be expected as it seemed that more and more people booked many cheap tickets on several flights and just used the one they needed. Making E class a flexible booking class...The other were refunded except for the 10 € base fare.

Therefore I can understand the introduction of this fee

flying_pig

I guess it is a clear move to avoid the cancellation of heavily discounted fares (like E), where in certain cases for intra-European routes the actual price is made 99% of refundable fuel surcharges and airport taxes.

Take, for example, a couple of return tickets LHR-MXP-LHR that I bought some tima ago. The price (E) was:
- 99 EUR taxes and other charges
- 1 EUR actual fare

In other words, I had tickets bought for 100EUR. When cancelling them, I used to get 99EUR refunded.

I'd say that this was an anomaly, making the cancellation (obviously not rebooking) of E fares as flexible as an Y fare.

Pity they corrected it, but I still think it is quite fair, especially if LH only applies the charge to fares that cost less than 150 EUR.

flying_pig

Ops, Tim2008 preceded me.

Felixberlin

It was a nice windfall but then it was clear it would not last forever.

For everybody who is now shifting business please let us know once you find a carrier that uses comparably low fare bases and still does refunds at no cost.

ranskis

the problem is the fuel surcharge that should be included in the fare... but they want to charge it on awards and also keep their fares in a good position in fare listing algorithms used by online websites and normal travel agents. A normal agent knows that there is a 30 EUR add on YQ per segment in Europe for LH, AF, KL, OS... and they will not be much lured by this practice. But in algorithms that look for the cheapest fares, they certainly use fare listing, and based on these fares and availability, some options that sometimes are cheaper are discarded in order to send back to the client a quote within a few seconds. And after a limited set of "cheap" options has been selected by the algorithm, taxes are added automatically....

captainiglo

Actually just found out last week that SWISS is charging a € 30,- cancellation fee even on their fully flexible business class tickets in Europe. Had to book short term, only fully flex available and in the top right corner when clicking on the price it said cancellation is free of charge, but on the final page it said that there is a cancellation fee. Well, since I had to cancel I found out it is actually € 30,- great way of charging on FULLY FLEXIBLE

cockpitvisit

I agree that flexible 99EUR tickets were an anomaly that wouldn't last forever. But the right way of doing this would be to include YQ in the base fare, instead of trying to charge the fee for bookings made before it was ever introduced.

Yes, they probably keep YQ to charge lots of money on award tickets, but (1) it is a scam too and (2) YQ for 99EUR tickets is already lower than YQ charged for awards and more expensive fares. They could simply lower it even further while keeping it the same for other tickets.

This is clearly a shameful attempt to steal money from people who bought tickets before this surcharge was added to T&C