Virgin Australia refund rights - any help/shared experiences?

Jennyxw

Hi all, 

To cut a very long story short, we've finally heard from Opodo that Virgin Australia are refusing to refund our flights (Melbourne > Hong Kong > London) from March 2020. This is after 15 months of to-ing and fro-ing. 

They state that this is due to Virgin Aus going into administration, and therefore not taking on their debts (ie, my refund)., to quote:
We are not able to process refunds for any tickets purchased prior to Virgin Australia entering voluntary administration, this includes all tickets and EMDs issued on/before 20 APRIL 2020.

Following the Voluntary Administration process, Virgin Australia entered a statutory arrangement with creditors called a ‘Deed of Company Arrangement’ (DOCA) on 25 September 2020. The DOCA was completed on 17 November, 2020, ending the external administration of the Virgin Australia Group. 

Upon completion of the DOCA, any entitlement to monetary compensation that you may otherwise have had in relation to the booking was extinguished in exchange for a Future Flight credit. 

We're talking to our credit card company and hope that we can claim it back through chargeback/Section 75 (as appropriate). 

I just wondered if anyone else has had any luck with getting money back from cancelled flights via Opodo and Virgin Australia? I feel like I should expect failure, but we're owed the best part of £1,000 so I want to keep on fighting!

Thanks all, 

Jenny 

Caz3121

Jennyxw said:

We're talking to our credit card company and hope that we can claim it back through chargeback/Section 75 (as appropriate). 

not sure either of these would work
chargeback usually has to be raised within 120 days (either of purchase or flight date)
S75 will likely fail as you had a middleman (opodo)

Did/does your travel insurance cover scheduled airline failure?

mattyprice4004

I'd go down the insurance route if you can - all other avenues don't look to be ones that'll work. 
Unfortunately Opodo are just an agent, so if they don't get a refund from Virgin there's nothing to pass back to you. 

lady1964

I feel your pain OP! We had to cancel internal VA flights as we couldn’t fly into Australia last September and we tried the chargeback option, however because the flight wasn’t cancelled by VA, it wasn’t a successful claim. We managed to get some money refunded by claiming on our travel insurance. We didn’t get it all because we’d bought 3 tickets, one being for our DD who’s not a dependent so we couldn’t get her fare back and we had to pay excess for our claim; we got about half of our money back.

Sorry, should also say we had booked before VA went into administration. I hope you are successful however you claim.

Edited to add that we had booked direct with VA so I can’t advise when booked via an agent/third party.

Thrugelmir

You didn't take out travel insurance? 

Jennyxw

lady1964 said:

I feel your pain OP! We had to cancel internal VA flights as we couldn’t fly into Australia last September and we tried the chargeback option, however because the flight wasn’t cancelled by VA, it wasn’t a successful claim. We managed to get some money refunded by claiming on our travel insurance. We didn’t get it all because we’d bought 3 tickets, one being for our DD who’s not a dependent so we couldn’t get her fare back and we had to pay excess for our claim; we got about half of our money back.

Sorry, should also say we had booked before VA went into administration. I hope you are successful however you claim.

Edited to add that we had booked direct with VA so I can’t advise when booked via an agent/third party.

Thanks for this, it's really helpful. One of our flights was outright cancelled by VA so maybe this changes things?  The other we couldn't take because the first flight was cancelled (ie, the HK to London went ahead, but because the Mel-HK leg was cancelled we couldn't get there, and Opodo couldn't transfer us to another flight). 
We also booked way way before VA went into administration. 

Jennyxw

Caz3121 said:

Jennyxw said:

We're talking to our credit card company and hope that we can claim it back through chargeback/Section 75 (as appropriate). 

not sure either of these would work
chargeback usually has to be raised within 120 days (either of purchase or flight date)
S75 will likely fail as you had a middleman (opodo)

Did/does your travel insurance cover scheduled airline failure?

They're happy to raise a claim b/c there is evidence that Opodo are still working on the 'purchase' within 120 days, in this case the fact that two months ago we have it logged that they were still in discussions with VA. 

And sadly our travel insurance doesn't cover this. I had a very long conversation with them several months ago, and from my memory (without checking my notes) it was because we found out the cancellelation a couple of days before we were due to fly out of Melbourne (ie, we weren't stranded) and also because the airline is legally responsible for sorting us out - therefore they couldn't cover it as it. Plus they don't include pandemic cover, obviously...! 

Jennyxw

Thrugelmir said:

You didn't take out travel insurance? 

We did  and they don't cover it - see my explanation above. It was also a single flight (it was the return flight from a backpacking trip) so it wasn't included in any other package holiday cover

Westin

You need to see if your policy covers what the insurance industry seem to term “SAFI”.

Schedule Airline Failure Insurance (SAFI) is often bought as an add-on or separate policy although some better travel insurance cover includes this.  I bought SAFI a couple of years back for a Norwegian flight when chatter was that they might not be long for this world.  It was an extra £10 pp and I didn’t need it as at the time Norwegian lumbered on for a year or so more.