My parents had Adventures in Airlines flying to America in October, and have been trying to resolve it since returning home. This is a repost of my Mom’s latest update on the situation:
I’ve been trying for a couple months to get a response from Aer Lingus regarding our trip to America in mid-October. Today I received a “donotreply” from them in which they cheerfully acknowledged that their agent screwed up, but essentially said, “Too bad.” My reaction is to write to the only source available to me, which is Facebook. So I sent the Aer Lingus page this missive:
Dear Facebook Aer Lingus:
I received a “donotreply” response from Aer Lingus moments ago, based on my reference number 242733. It seems Aer Lingus claims no responsibility for its agent’s error on our flight reservations in October. The issue was and is that when we arrived in good time for a flight from Dublin to Heathrow we were offered an earlier flight to Heathrow by an Aer Lingus agent. Innocent us, we accepted it.
However, the agent failed to remove our names from the manifest for the later flight on which we were originally booked. That resulted in our connecting flights – all of them, going and coming – being cancelled as we appeared as “no shows” on the originally scheduled flight. We were held in Heathrow while United Airlines tracked down the root of the issue. They put us on the flight from London to Dulles, but only after they determined that Aer Lingus erred. United’s agent, and her supervisor, said that it had happened several times and only with Aer Lingus flights.
When we arrived at Dulles, we were told our flight to Burlington VT was gone, and the United agent rescheduled us on a flight from Dulles to Newark and a flight to Burlington the next morning. As a room at the hotel that’s physically at Newark airport went for $324 per night, we, a couple of pensioners, spent the night in Newark terminal.
We had precisely the same kinds of issues trying to return home to Ireland. We weren’t on the manifest. We couldn’t print boarding passes. Once again United went to considerable lengths to arrange new passage so we could get home to Dublin.
Disregarding inconvenience, we are out the cost of a hotel room which we’d booked and paid for in Burlington but instead spent the night in Newark airport. The room in Burlington lay empty waiting for us. We are also out the cost of one day’s car rental in Burlington, and had to pay for a number of meals while we were languishing between flights.
Unless this problem is resolved, and I do not view “too bad, buster” as a resolution, we will be certain to tell everyone we know of Aer Lingus’ efforts to keep its customers happy. Or not.
Honestly, this is *not* something the airlines should be unable to resolve and reimburse, particularly since they’ve admitted they’re at fault.