Air Canada now issuing refunds

daisyfrau

Just in case this helps anyone....
Air Canada has recently changed its’ policy on flight changes/cancellations by the airline. Having previously
 offered a fully transferable travel voucher valid up to 2 years to anyone cancelling lights for coronavirus/schedule change reasons, as of 29 June they are now complying with that EU directive that says if your flight is cancelled/changed you should have choice of refund or accepting rescheduled flight. 

We were due to travel in 2 weeks, three flights round trip LHR-YYZ-YHZ-LHR over 2 weeks and despite multiple changes to these flights since we originally booked AC insisted that as the flights were non-refundable our only option was to travel or to go for travel voucher. However - rang today after reading of change on website and they have now agreed to refund all 3 flights. I know it’s meant to take place within 7 days but they said realistically will take longer for approval, then at least 1-2 billing cycles (goodness knows how long these are) for it to be processed. But we do have written confirmation it has been sent to refund dept for processing of refund.

I did have to go on the .com website and call the Canada/USA number fo get it processed. I didn’t find/try the UK website numbers...

daisyfrau

Just a quick update: just over 24h later I have had an email from refund dept confirming that the refund is now “confirmed” and it’s a full refund of everything we had paid. 

If it helps to know, I had already previously applied for the travel voucher in mid-June back when refunds weren’t an option for non-refundable tickets like ours, but that hadn’t yet been processed (had been told to expect confirmation in September) but it seems refund dept works a lot quicker.


I hope this will help someone who may or may not have applied for the travel voucher, but who would have preferred a refund above all options.

Again - it seems key criteria is that airline has changed or cancelled your flights (even if alternative flights were offered). Good luck!

daisyfrau

Final update: we received full refund into our bank account yesterday. So overall took 4 days from phone call to money back (incl weekend).

Hope this will help someone else. Good luck all trying to get refunds.