ticket refund: poor response from Travelocity and Aeroflot ?
 

I am looking for help / advice on resolving a non-standard situation with Travelocity and Aeroflot.

I booked Aeroflot ticket for my mother through Travelocity. Then she had a serious health issue and had to cancel the trip for medical reason. Aeroflot said that, for such reason, this ticket was refundable, if proper documentation was provided (letter from doctor's office). Mo mother came to Aeroflot office in St Petersburg and provided the document, at which point she was told that Travelocity has to contact Aeroflot to get this refund going.

My wife called Travelocity multiple times, and emailed them the scanned document ~4 times. They dragged their response for more than a week, could not even confirm reception of email with documentation, and finally said that they called Aeroflot and were denied the refund.

I tried to escalate it on both sides, assuming that there is some misunderstanding here. Aeroflot Call Center keeps telling me that the refund is possible, but they are not set up to even see the details of my claim. Travelocity call center tells me that they cannot even disclose the details of their conversation with Aeroflot to me, the only thing I have is the Aeroflot Agent ID of the person they talked to.

On both sides, my feeling is that I am talking to people who know how to respond to standard scripted situations, but do not know how to handle this non-standard case. In case of Travelocity, this applies even to their "supervisor" level.

Does anyone have similar experience and advice on how to push this matter in a productive way ? I feel like I need to find decision-making people on both sides and set up a 3-way conference call with them to figure this out, but even finding such a person proves to be a challenge, I am getting nowhere after 4-5 rounds of speaking with each side.

If normal communication does not wok, is there some entity like BBB that would be helpful ? I assume that both Travelocity and Aeroflot might become more responsive if I get the appropriate overseeing body to talk on my behalf.

Thank you in advance for help,
Yuriy.

Just to clarify the flight is from where to where? All on Aeroflot? Booked on which country's Travelocity site?

The flight was from St Petersburg Russia to New York USA, booked from USA on American Travelocity.com website.

Initiate complaints with BBB, DOT and your State Attorney Generals office and inform Travelocity of such. Tell them they have 24 hours to rectify this situation.

Why send the ultimatum only to Travelocity?

Because if the ticket was purchased through an OLTA, then they must make all refunds and changes, at least before the first flight is flown; they "control" the ticket until check in or the initial departure.

Chris Elliott's blogsite contains names and contact information for various high level airline personnel. I'm not sure whether he also posts contacts for OLTAs.

Does no good to issue an ultimatum to an agent if the principle refuses to make the refund.

Aside from that, I have dealt directly with airlines in situations like this. The "agent solely controls the itinerary until travel begins" rule appears not to be so ironclad.

is there any difference between refunding ticket and refunding taxes ?
 

thank you for feedback, I will keep you posted.

is there any difference/nuance between refunding ticket and refunding taxes ?

On Travelocity side, phone calls were somewhat productive, although the mechanics was terrible (I was on hold for hours, and disconnected twice, and on every re-connect I had to deal with a different supervisor because they were unable to connect me back to the original one). I managed to get Travelocity to send me email confirmation that they called Aeroflot and were denied authorization for full refund. Also, they offered to trigger some internal mechanisms to try and refund the taxes.

On Aeroflot side, phone calls were relatively useless, but email communication pointed to a formal complaint mechanism on their website (it is nested behind the Feedback button) . I submitted this story of contradiction between Aeroflot replies to me and to Travelocity and asked for help getting this whole situation clarified and resolved.

My plan for now is to get Aeroflot's response in writing (it may take days or weeks) and, based on that, decide how to proceed with Travelocity.

Twitter them if they use that platform.

Taxes, etc are often refundable even if the unused airfare is not.