Section 75 Airline tickets

PMadvice

Hi
I booked 4 tickets with Gulf air
I then had a change in circumstances and I wrote to them asking them to cancel my ticket and issue me a full refund.
Gulf Air sent me a email saying my tickets were cancelled and I had been charged £200 per ticket for fees- I never received any further information on what these fees were
I contacted them via email that day and also called them to say I asked for full refund if they couldn’t offer that then they should have advised before canceling 
Customer service said its a management issue and since not been 24hrs they could reinstate 
after a long battle and very little response from gulf I got no where
I then took my case to Barclays CC, under section 75 - no goods provided
they say as I asked for the cancellation there’s nothing they can do! I said I asked for a cancellation with full refund if they couldn’t do they they should have advised etc the costs. Barclays tried to locate the T&C of gulf airline site but even they could not find it and it was very unclear the charges/refund.
what should I do please? 

Any help - these tickets cost me £3000!
thanks

eskbanker

https://www.gulfair.com/transparency/conditions-of-carriage states:

10.3.1 If you are entitled to a refund of your Ticket for reasons other than those set out in 10.2, the amount of the refund shall be:

10.3.1.1 if no portion of the Ticket has been used, an amount equal to the fare paid, less any reasonable service charges or cancellation fees;

but https://www.gulfair.com/support/refund-policy mentions a figure that covers (a smallish) part of it:

An administrative refund charge of BHD10/USD30 or equivalent in other currencies is applicable for any refund of any ticket. This is in addition to any refund charges as stipulated in the detailed fare rules.

What are the detailed fare rules for the tickets you bought?

It seems that there's no breach of contract here, so I can see why a s75 claim was unlikely to succeed - turning the issue round the other way, what led you to believe that you'd be entitled to a full refund with no deductions?

Does your travel insurance perhaps allow a claim for the change in your circumstances?

PMadvice

Sadly I did not have travel insurance at the time
with regards to why I thought I would get a refund- I am not a seasoned traveller so for me it was a simple request? More like why not get a refund as they would be able to resell the tickets?
more main issue is why they failed to notify full refund is not available and just cancelled the tickets? And also didn’t even give me a breakdown of charges?
I have emailed and called but no response, even made official complaint on their site but no response.
why does one word hold so much weight? “Cancel” but the word next to it “full refund” can be ignored?

Alan_Bowen

For the straightforward reason that the vast majority of tickets are sold on the basis the customer wants the cheapest fare available on the day of booking. These fares are usually completely non-refundable except for taxes the airline no longer has to pay the UK government. Unless you asked for refundable tickets, and I assume you bought directly from the airline, then cancelling means losing the value of the ticket, which is why you should have had insurance. 

PMadvice

Sorry but I think I am going around in circles 
should the airline not have advised me that full refund is not possible before canceling my ticket? Am I not even entitled to that?

DullGreyGuy

PMadvice said:

Sadly I did not have travel insurance at the time
with regards to why I thought I would get a refund- I am not a seasoned traveller so for me it was a simple request? More like why not get a refund as they would be able to resell the tickets?
more main issue is why they failed to notify full refund is not available and just cancelled the tickets? And also didn’t even give me a breakdown of charges?
I have emailed and called but no response, even made official complaint on their site but no response.
why does one word hold so much weight? “Cancel” but the word next to it “full refund” can be ignored?

The vast majority of airlines tickets sold are on a non-refundable basis... you can buy flexible and semi-flexible tickets but they are often twice the price or more. If you have a non-flexible/non-refundable ticket as 95%+ of people do the only thing you can get back is the taxes you paid if you cancel and even then the airline can charge an admin fee for processing that and some governments (eg India) dont allow full refund. 

Terms of carriage are easily found on their website https://www.gulfair.com/transparency/conditions-of-carriage and section 10 (and mainly 10.3) covers cancelling tickets. 

You would need to check what tariff of ticket you bought but its generally very easy to work out... if you were looking for cheap you bought non-refundable. If you explicitly thought you needed flexibility and paid a premium to get it then there may be some (limited) cancellation allowed. 

If you go through their booking process again you will see Economy has three options "Light" has a £200 charge, "Smart" £175 and "Flex" £150 but looking at a random date you pay an extra 25% fair to go from Light to Flex. Business Class only has 2 options of £200 or no fee but no fee costs £500 more. 

As always there are semantics here, they gave you the full refund you were entitled to which is the fair minus the cancellation charge you selected when you chose Economy Light.

There is no breach of contract, there will be no S75 success unless the credit card company messes up

Mands

Previous thread, to save people wasting time on explanations that have already been made.

In that thread you said Gulf Air had told you there would be a £200 per person charge before they went ahead.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6402941/ticket-price-drop/p1

Ayr_Rage

Gulf Air and Barclays are both correct.

You have received the refund you were entitled to according to the ticket booking conditions.

As you cancelled, you are not entitled to claim under Section 75 with Barclays.

Edit : 

Having now read both of the OP's topics, it wasn't a change of circumstances that precipitated the cancellation but the fact that they noticed that the price had dropped after they had booked and they wanted to cancel and rebook at the lower price, however they had not taken account of the applicable cancellation charge.

@PMadvice, sorry, you have no claim against either party.

eskbanker

PMadvice said:

with regards to why I thought I would get a refund- I am not a seasoned traveller so for me it was a simple request? More like why not get a refund as they would be able to resell the tickets?

It's nothing to do with being a seasoned traveller - it's just like any other purchase, in that you enter into a contract with the other party, and this determines if either has the right to cancel and what the consequences are.  There may be concessions offered by some retailers, but in general, you don't have the unilateral right to change your mind and reverse out of a binding contract with the right to have all your money back - whether or not the merchant can mitigate their losses is irrelevant to your contractual rights and obligations.

PMadvice said:

Sorry but I think I am going around in circles 
should the airline not have advised me that full refund is not possible before canceling my ticket? Am I not even entitled to that?

Based on your other thread it did appear that the airline advised you, but even if they didn't, they'll have expected you to be familiar with the terms of the booking that you signed up to and aren't obliged to reiterate these to you when you've asked them to cancel.  If the booking was actually as you described last year ("they are economy flights with non-refundable policy") then it sounds like you were lucky to get about 75% of your money back, so carping about losing 25% is missing the point....

PMadvice

Thanks everyone for advice and information, this has been an eye opener for me and a huge learning lesson!