SWISS AIR TERRIBLE - HELP

Noelman105

In February we booked 3 return flight from the UK to the Phillipines with Swiss Air. One started in Birmingham and 2 in London so there were 2 separate bookings.

Quite soon after booking one of the flights legs was cancelled which meant an additional 8 hours in Zurich Airport. Annoying but as frequent flyers we know these things happen so accepted it.

However almost every month we have received an email stating "Please call us urgently" due to a change in our flight. They then offer us insane alternatives, one include an ADDITIONAL (to the layovers already) 21 hours in layovers. We reject them as we have found better alternatives on their website, they claim the flights are full, we argue they are not and eventually they relent and say the booking is confirmed.

However then a few weeks (or sometimes hours) later we receive another email and they say the flight is no longer available.

Between us we have spent 25+ hours with Swiss and they have shown no sympathy or remorse. When we call they think we have only just purchased the ticket as the 'new' tickets have only just been reissued and we have to convince them we booked in February and have had numerous changes.

Last night my partner spent an hour on the phone and we were told the return flights were confirmed however this morning we woke up to a "Please call us urgently" and we're told the flights were no longer available.

They say we have to fly a day before or after or a refund.....but alternative flights are much more expensive now.

The flights they say are no longer available are with a partner airline and our current status is that we have no return flights.

Does anyone have any advice? Is there anything we can do. 

eskbanker

While I can sympathise with the poor customer experience angle of much of your post, the focus presumably needs to be on ascertaining exactly what your current rights are under the regulations, so when did you last have a confirmed and documented or ticketed reservation?

For that booking, are you challenging that the flights are unavailable, or recognising that they are and simply trying to find acceptable alternatives?

bagand96

Odd situation.  Almost sounds like an IT glitch generating the loop of booking/cancellation emails.  What does the booking show when you log into the Swiss website? Are you booked on your requested flights or does it show cancelled?

Noelman105 said:

They say we have to fly a day before or after or a refund.....but alternative flights are much more expensive now.

The flights they say are no longer available are with a partner airline and our current status is that we have no return flights.

Does anyone have any advice? Is there anything we can do. 

Your rights under EC261 are for your choice of refund or re-routing.  If the re-routing options Swiss provide are not acceptable you can request rerouting on other airlines on the same travel date.  Swiss are part of Lufthansa group so it might be worth searching on Lufthansa.com to see if there's any acceptable alternatives on your travel date (you're not limited to Lufthansa group either - but it might be easier to persuade them to rebook you on codeshare flights)

Noelman105

Hello. It currently only shows the outbound flight and no return is showing.....as though we never booked it.
One of the flights they rebooked us on was with Lufthansa....but a a few days later ai received an email saying "Please call us urgently" and they they said it was no longer available. We have also been booked onto a Singapore airways flight twice but the same thing happens again.

Tim_L

This sounds awful. Is there a problem with all three tickets? Roughly when is it? Was it a direct booking or with a travel agent? 

You're entitled under UK261 to a rebooking under similar travel conditions at a time that works for you. My suggestion is to look at flight sequences using google flights or similar and have a list of possibilities when you call in next. The price is irrelevant, as is the airline strictly speaking, but you will find marketing carriers like to restrict choices to those they have an agreement with (not necessarily codeshare or alliance partner). If they can't accomodate you then at the limit you can book your own flights and ask for reimbursement but that would take more cojones than I have for an expensive long haul flight and I don't recommend it. 

Do not under any circumstances cancel for a refund at this point as the fact of having a confirmed reservation in the first place gives you a lot of leverage, and in effect your ticket just became fully flex if you couldn't travel. You should have a ticket number, I think for Swiss this is 724-xxxxxxxx where xxxxxx is a long number. If you don't have one, or can't find one against your PNR (6 digit code) anywhere, this may indicate the underlying problem is that the ticketing failed and you need to get this sorted out first. This should be somewhere in your e-ticket/receipt email chain or available via the Swissair website.

Note that for a cancellation, going a day early (with final arrival a day early) or more than 3 hours late on arrival against original final destination time puts you in scope for UK261. 4 hours is the magic lateness, when doors open on the final flight, which would generate £550 per passenger, 3-4 is half that. And if you're early and need a night in a hotel, the airline is on the hook for hotel and food expenses, you retroclaim (the helpline usually says they don't do this if you ask beforehand). So if you have flexibility consider going with the flow. You obviously can't pick flights to engineer this.

A really good place to ask these questions - and where I usually hang out as 'bisonrav', but I'm back to MSE after a few years away - is flyertalk forums. It's not the friendliest of places, but the knowledge there is second to none.

Noelman105

Thank you Tim, that's all really helpful. One of the changes they made meant an overnight stay in Singapore and they said we were entitled to a hotel but now when we phone up they say no.....I think this is because they think it's a 'new' ticket as it's been reissued.

When we call we get booked onto another flight and one that we are happy with.....but within a few hours we get the "call us urgently" email and we are told "the flight is no longer available". This has happened 6 times. We have no faith that the next time will be any different and when we ask to speak to someone more senior they refuse.

We have emailed a complaint about 4 days ago and awaiting a response so fingers crossed something happens.

Tim_L

So the next step is to check whether the flight you're theoretically rebooked on is cancelled or not. You need to go armed with information to the next call and get very assertive while not being angry (it's a hard job,I've been there!). So I would have to hand the full details of the flight, the fact that it's still operating (as is likely) and a suggestion for a replacement sequence. It sounds like something has gone wrong with the reticketing and you're being dumped off an operating flight, the front line support people are clueless, so you need to penetrate a bit deeper. When is the flight, do you have time to deal with this?

Just ignore what they say about hotels in Singapore if needed, and the reticketing shouldn't matter as the PNR should be annotated. At the worst case you would take them to MCOL or possibly CEDR via their UK office for reimbursement but typically those dealing with retro-claims are a bit more clued in and pay without quibbling. Don't book yourself into the the Marina Bay Sands, but a reasonable chain hotel is fine. As you may know, taxis in Singapore are cheap and easy and you can get a receipt and claim for that too if you need it. I would personally probably shoot for an overnight in Singapore if I had the option as it's a nice break in the flight sequence and you get a free meal or two.

What are the carriers and flights involved? Don't include dates or flight numbers, just which carrier the flight is on, source and destination airports, and what the cancellations were/are. In theory you deal with the operating carrier on a cancellation but you can get passed from pillar to post when you do this and you're passed back to the marketing carrier. I suspect that if you are changing carriers on the rebooked flight, the reservation has failed somewhere across the interface, so approaching it from the direction of the operating carrier may be helpful.

 

Westin

Just to throw in another angle, are you accessing different PNR’s on each of the airline websites (Lufthansa, Swiss and Singapore)?  Lufthansa and Swiss share ownership but it seems possibly not shared websites.

We had a not dissimilar issue with LH when returned from Australia via Singapore last year.  The flights had been purchased via LH with both LH, SQ and QA flights. All flights initially shown on the LH website but we could also see the SQ and QA ones on the Singapore and Qantas websites.  All fine until Lufthansa cancelled our SIN FRA LGW flights due to a cabin crew strike.  We ended up flying back from Australia to Singapore as originally planned on SQ but then routed onto Swissair between SIN ZRH LHR.  These last Swissair flights only showed on the SQ and LX website, not on LH on our original booking.  On the LH website our flight itinerary stopped in SIN.  It just seemed that LH could not find our reservation back from SIN a when contacted, yet it was a flight change on to LX that they initially made. I had to use the LX website to manage my new SIN ZRH LHR flights.  LH and LX seemed very disconnected.