First of all, let me say that I am very happy to have discovered FT (just about 3 months ago)! I wish it had happened a couple years ago when I used to travel a lot more than these days, but I will put it in the "Better late than never" category. In the last 3 months I have learnt a lot about making the most of business/personal travel.

I have read a lot about BUMPS on several threads, but my question is slightly different. Earlier this year (late spring) I took my family of 5 to Europe on Alitalia from YYZ in Business Class. Since it was significantly cheaper to fly from YYZ to MXP than from ATL to MXP, we flew Delta from ATL to YYZ (on a separate ticket). The hotels were paid for (priceline) in Europe. The night before the YYZ-MXP flight I got a call from Alitalia saying that my flight was cancelled (ground crew in Italy were on strike and we were told that stikes are not uncommon for Alitalia) and they would allow us to fly either a day early of a day late. Since we had mostly non-changeable reservations (air, hotel, etc.) I told Alitalia that we had to fly on our particular date. After several hours of "discussion" Alitalia agreed to route us from YYZ-BOS (Air Canada), BOS-MXP (Alitalia) in economy class without refunding any fare difference (I still don't understand if the flight from BOS could land in MXP why could the flight from YYZ not land). Anyway, after some more "discussions" they agreed to put us on a waitlist for business class for the BOS-MXP segment. At this point I just gave in and hoped for the best. So we flew YYZ-BOS in economy and luckily our business class waitlist was cleared about 1 hour before the flight from BOS. We had a great time in Europe, but with my luck on the way back we had the exact same situation. The flight from MXP to YYZ was cancelled (this time it happened after we had already checked in and we were sitting in the Alitalia lounge). We went through exactly the same ordeal to get to BOS and then on to YYZ. When we got to BOS we found out that our luggage did not make it because of the last minute change in flight. Clearing customs without luggage in BOS was a bit of a hassle and on top of this our BOS-YYZ were not booked correctly so we ended up spending the night in BOS. The following day we made it to YYZ in economy class and our luggage arrived home about two weeks later. To say the least, it was a very memorable trip.

I fully expected Alitalia to pick up the tab for all the re-routing and the one night hotel stay in BOS, which they did. I asked for some comp for the delayed luggage but since we were already home there was no comp.

My questions are:

1. Should I have asked for / received more comp for all the incovenience, economy class travel for several segments for a business class fare, reduced mileage because BOS-MXP is less than YYZ-MXP?
2. Are cancelled flights totally different than BUMPS, i.e. do the travel vouchers, free tickets, etc. apply to cancelled flights?
3. Does it matter that we were paid business class passengers, i.e. should we have expected slightly better comp?
4. Is it true that this is a typical Alitalia problem or am I just the lucky soul that was struck by lightning twice?


-Ray

Buzz? (The same could be said for the poster's E-Rewards thread as well.)

First, try doing a search for force majuere.

Second, you would need to look at the Contract of Carriage, which might well be different in Canada than in the U.S.

Welcome to Flyertalk, ray, and sorry to hear about your difficult trip.

Since the questions aren't related to miles and points (though I guess you could be asking for some as compensation), I'm not sure that MilesBuzz is the correct forum. MilesBuzz is for Instead, I'm going to move the thread to the TravelBuzz forum. Please continue the discussion there.

Regards,
Gary
aka gleff
MilesBuzz and Delta moderator