AirFareNetwork 11 December 2020 at 6:46PM in Flight delay compensation 4 replies 76 views

thechika

Does anyone have any experience with this company? Anyone live in Leicester? This is their address 401 Melton Road, Leicester LE4 7PA

I bought my ticket before the pandemic. They gave the option of 

1 - to fly - but the departure date was March 18th 2020 - I chose not to!
2. to get a 'refund' of £250 against an £800 ticket
3. to book another flight within a year.
I chose the latter. I have been trying to book a flight with them for 2 weeks now. 
They do not answer any phone numbers - I have been on hold for up to 4 hours at a time - no one replies
The option on the phone to "leave a message and the agent will call you back", does not work
Email queries are dealt with every 2-4 days and the agent only answers one of my 5 questions and offers no options or alternatives 
They came back with one option which I queried. After 3 days I received a scribbled one-line response.
The last email told me that the airline was no longer flying to my destination on that date. I had given a wide range so I am not sure if that applies to all dates.
I cannot go to the airline direct - Lufthansa they direct me back to Airfarenetwork.
Does anyone have any ideas about my options? At present, it looks like I am losing £800 and I cannot afford to buy another flight which is for work.
There are so many negative reviews for them from all over the world. How do they get away with it?!
There must be something that can be done to stop them, 

Alan_Bowen

So many issues in this case! Looking at the website they appear to have stolen it from a US company of a similar name, the booking conditions state they relate to US citizens, few of which are likely to be found booking flights with the Singh family who appear to own Faregeek, the company supposedly behind the website. Their latest accounts filed in 2019 state the number of employees as nil, which suggests the real business is probably based overseas, India would be my guess. They display the ATOL logo despite the fact that the CAA website doesn't recognise the name at all as actually having an ATOL licence! They claim all sales are ATOL protected, did you get an ATOL Certificate by any chance, I suspect not? 
If you paid by credit card and the airline cancelled the flight, not you, then Lufthansa should have refunded in full as required by a law known as EU261, you could contact them to see if they did and when and pass that information to your card issuer and say you want to make a claim under section  75 of the Consumer Credit Act for a breach of contract by their refusal to pass on your refund 

Westin

Well I'll offer my thanks for your reply @Alan_Bowen even if the OP can't be bothered to.

Alan_Bowen

Westin, if we waited for 'thanks' for every post, we would soon stop spending our lunch hours trying to help! But my thanks to you for your thanks to me!

Caz3121

thechika said:

There are so many negative reviews for them from all over the world. How do they get away with it?!
There must be something that can be done to stop them, 

I guess the question is 'why did you choose them'? (maybe all their other customers use the same criteria)
There are many poor third party ticket floggers about, their customer base will be those that choose not to research in advance who they plan to give their money to (as you say the negative reviews are there) or read the terms and conditions (you will likely find service fees in there) and select the cheapest advert from a comparison site that they pay to appear on.
When you select a company based on low cost you will often find they can offer low cost by having low operating costs which will mean very limited after sales service.
Given that this was a ticket for work, was there a reason you could not book direct with the airline?