mileage redemption cancellation experience
 

In case this experience helps anyone else: Was on hold about an hour, 5:15pm - 6:15pm eastern time. Rep answered and cancelled my flying red redemption tickets on Delta. Got everything back mileage-wise in the account in less than 2 minutes. Lost the $5.10 per ticket tax. This was a trip I elected to cancel - Delta still has it scheduled. But I am sure that it would not be a relaxing time to go on vacation, so cancelation was the right decision. Anyway, the point of the post is that cancelling the reward tickets was easy and relatively low cost.

BJFly

I assume you called the U.S. number? What did you select from the automated menu?

I've tried contacting them through WhatsApp two days ago, but haven't heard back yet. Sounds like I just need to suck it up and call them and wait on hold.....

Called at 5:30 am EST and it still took about an hour to get through. Got my miles back immediately and was told that I would get all my taxes back as ANA had cancelled my flight to Japan. However I was warned it would take a LONG time to get the refund (1+ months) and even getting a confirmation email about the cancellation would take about a month.

I did my cancelation through WhatsApp. I left my request there and it took them two days to respond. Mine was Delta operated but flight canceled by Delta.

Cancellation approved on 5/14, miles back instantly. The taxes and fees they said "are taking longer than usual due to covid-19. Please be assured however that your refund is now in a queue to be completed. You do not need to chase us to find out the status of your refund, as we will send you an email once it has been processed on our side. "

No emails yet regarding the taxes and fees.

Yes. I used the US number. The chatbox, text, and email approaches all were a big fail. I can't recall which prompt I picked. But I just put the phone on speaker and waited, and the rest is as described in my initial post.

BJFly

I have a ticket booked on Virgin Atlantic using Flying Club miles for two people in mid-June. I don't think I would be going to UK and I would like my 30k miles and my award fees and taxes of $298 back.

I did get through to an agent on WhatsApp but she said it would be $50x2 cancellation fee. She could not confirm what the amount I would get back.

I have not read about the $50 pp fee for Virgin Atlantic award flight cancellations. I want to see if those who had gone through this were charged. Note that the flight is not cancelled so far.

You either wait for the flight to be cancelled or you pay the cancellation fee - $50 per person is correct.

Any excess cash from taxes, surcharges, etc. will be refunded, but it will take several weeks to arrive...

Thanks Craig. I think I will wait until early June to see if they will cancel my flight before proceeding.
Safe travels.

$50 or not $50
 

That was painful. I tried to cancel via text over WhatsApp every few days and kept being told that they didn't have access to accounts. Then they stopped responding. I had to call since the cancelled flights were supposed to depart in a few days.

Waited about 1.5 hours on hold and the representative was able to refund the miles right away and put in the refund request for the taxes.

I finally got through to someone on WhatsApp after about a month of trying. The representative "Martin" said that I'd see miles returned to my account within 24 hours, and award taxes refunded some time TBD. It's been a few days and to date, I still do not see miles returned to my account yet. No refund of award fees and taxes as well, of course.

When I cancelled via phone in April the miles were back instantly. Note there wasn't an entry for the miles at that time (though that did show up later) but my total balance changed instantly. Of course that was before all their recent IT issues with FC so maybe something has changed. Still waiting on my refund of taxes and fees though.

Thank you for sharing your experience. I was trying to avoid dialing in but maybe it is unavoidable.

I opened a DOT complaint while I kept trying to contact someone on WhatsApp. I finally got the miles back into my account yesterday. I have no idea if the DOT complain has anything to do with it.

Let's see when I will get my award fees and taxes back.

What do you guys do with the VS miles? I was looking to transfer into IHG program and it says that you have to call in.

DOT is so backlogged unless you did it weeks ago I doubt DOT had any impact. I filed a DOT complaint against TAP in April and the response was pretty quick from both DOT and TAP (2-3 business days though TAP's response was pretty worthless). Did VS DOT complaint just over a week ago and haven't heard anything from DOT nevermind VS other than a canned message that DOT was backlogged. As for the points I use them to fly as you take quite a haircut value-wise transferring them to IHG and Hilton. Historically Hilton was thought to be the slightly better value of the two but maybe the IHG variable pricing has changed that but I haven't investigated. And yes you have to call it or use text/WhatsApp to do transfer.