Refused flight with valid tickett!
 

Hi!
Just before christmas me an my girlfriend were reused the vaccation flight to Bangkok from Wienna. This was the last step of the tripp wich started in Munich.
We had recieved boardingpasses for the flight , but the staff of Austrian took the descion to deny us because they said it was to cheap.
We had bought the tickets from Skytours and they were issued by Austrian.
According to the Staff of Austrian the tickets were incorrect and the price was to cheap ( 1600 Euro) for both.
Our vaccation was allready planned and paid so we had to buy new ticketts on scene 10 minuts before departure for 2300 Euro.
We were suffering of this the entire vaccation and ar now in a dispute with Austrian airlines and the travelagency Skytours.
Skytours say its a breach of contract and that the ticketts were valid. However as a person you are and feel a little helpless.
Has anybody experianced this before and what to do ????
Any help is much welcome!
Sincerely
Mattias , Petra.

Welcome to FT. I want to make sure you get the right answer/expertise to your question so I'm going to move this to Travel Buzz since the airline in question does not have its own forum - hopefully other travelers who have been in this situation can chime in to help you.

(This forum is for community get-togethers and the other two forums you posted in are for technical issues specific to the website/forums and actual reports about locations/trips taken. Also... cross-posting is discouraged here - we'll work to help you find the right place to post if you just post it once. :cool: )

Have you contacted your credit card company as they may be able to help if you paid that way.

If Skytours is taking your case to Austrian then they are doing their job. It sounds like you had a consolidator fare (hence the "breach of contract" comment), not a published fare. Be prepared for this to take a while, I would estimate 6-8 weeks if it were here in the US. If Skytours is a reputable agency, then they will be your advocate.

Hi! Who did you buy your tickets from? Did you use a credit card?? If so, then you have recourse against the merchant who charged your credit card for the 1600 Euro for "services not rendered". In other words, you need to dispute the charge on your credit card and have it charged back to the merchant's bank account. Don't wait for the merchant to try to work things out with the Airline as sometimes this can drag on and eventually you will run out of time. Your credit card bank only has a certain amount of time in which to process a chargeback. Since the date of service was right before Christmas then you still have time to dispute the charge (if you charged it on a credit card, if not then you have to depend on Skytours to work things out). Don't wait any longer if you charged it, as sometimes it takes a hit to a merchants' bank account to get things rolling. Good luck!!

I had some involvement with a similar case when I was working for an airline many years ago.

In this particular case the travel agent had charged a fare that was valid for the trip - but not being able to get seats in the right fare bucket for every leg of the flight they had booked some sectors in a higher booking class - i.e., these passengers were travelling on a fare corresponding to something like a V (=cheap Economy) booking class but were booked in something like S (=expensive Economy). The discrepancy got spotted by airline staff, and the travel agent ended up having to pay the difference between the fare they had charged and the fare they should have charged.

I wonder if something similar happened here?

Another point - the OP states the tickets were issued by Austrian. Tickets booked through appointed travel agents are usually issued by the travel agent, not by the airline - they may look like they were issued by the airline because the have the airline's name on them and are printed on the airline's ticket stock, but it's usually the agent, not the airline, that does the ticketing... so the first time any Austrian Airlines staff would have seen this ticket would have been at check-in.

BTW, I take it this Skytours outfit is www.skytours.at?

regarding claiming the funds back via credit card: This will help the OP not to pay twice, but in his position I would also be looking for someone to cover the 700 euros difference between the 1600 and 2300 euros. If I was not planning to spend more than 1600 euros, it should not be my problem. So the question is who should compensate him for the extra 700 euros: the agent or the airline? I guess in any case it should be the agent- and they should claim it back from the airline if indeed they issued a valid ticket.

The OP is actually out the 1600E and 2300E, so at this point he's looking for a 2300E refund, not just 700E. But in any case, if the tickets issued were on valid fares that Skytours has contracted for with Austrian, Austrian should issue a refund for the new 2300E tickets. If Skytours was doing something shady, then they should be responsible. As long as Skytours is picking up the ball and running with it, then that says (to me, at least) that the Austrian personnel who made it their business to deny boarding because the fare was "too cheap" should have kept their noses out of it. My experience is that if the fare was invalid, Austrian would have eventually sent Skytours a bill for the difference after auditing the ticket, and the passengers would not be inconvenienced. Gate personnel have no business trying to be the rate desk.

As to whether Skytours should refund the passenger now, the problem is that eventually any refund issued will go back to the credit card. So if Skytours refunds the passenger now, and Austrian refunds later, the OP will have 2 refunds. What does Skytours do then?

Austrian is certainly not making many friends it seems. As of late, a lot of us are having issues with them in regards to ticketing of an Air Canada ticket that is in the Mileage Run forum. This "fare seems too low" is not an excuse for shoddy customer service.

If Skytours can't reach a satisfactory (to you) result with Austrian Air, you might consider writing the Ombudsman at Conde Nast Traveler magazine. They can often get the airline (or travel agency) to take a second look due to the potential for bad publicity in their magazine if they appear to be shorting the traveler.