FEBRUARY 6, SUNDAY

VUELING AIRLINE

Part two in my dealing with big corporations. I don’t know how big a corporation Vueling Airlines is. They are a Spanish airline and claim on their website that they were voted last year as the Best Low Cost Airline in Europe, 2021.

My planned flight to Barcelona was on a combination of United, Swiss and Lufthansa and I will get to that tomorrow. Once I got to Barcelona I was going to fly to Morocco on Vueling, a low cost regional airline, and back to Barcelona on another low cost airline, Ryanair.

Both airline’s lowest cost fare, which I bought, didn’t allow any luggage except a very small underseat bag. I bought an underseat bag on Amazon but had difficulty finding a small enough bag. It turns out that every airline has different sized spaces under the seat so there are no standardized bags as there are with carry on bags stored overhead. It also means that I could take very little to Morocco. But by stuffing my vest with electronic gear and taking only one change of clothes I thought I could make it.

But when I bought my Vueling ticket on line they immediately tried to intimidate me by saying if my bag was only a tiny bit too big I would have to pay $60 extra to take it on board. I was intimidated and so paid 9.50 Euros extra for a larger sized carry on bag. I also paid 12.50 euros for travel insurance and 4.35 euros for flight cancellation insurance as well as 33.99 euros for the flight itself, 60.34 euros total for a two hour flight, 1000 miles, about $70 total or $40 for the flight itself, cheap.

But when United cancelled the first leg of my flight to Barcelona and I decided to get a refund and cancelled my trip. And I wanted to see what kind of refund I could get from Vueling for the Barcelona/Marrakesh flight that I wouldn’t be able to take. And that is what this post is about.

My problem I slowly discovered was that this flight was too cheap, too good a deal, everything about it. First I thought that, no problem, I had cancellation insurance. But when I looked at the cancellation insurance I discovered that only a major war or hospitalization for Covid or a summons to a court case of the death of a close family member would qualify me. I wondered if the travel insurance, which included health insurance, would kick in unless I was on my deathbed, and maybe only after that. But I wasn’t going on the flight and although I had no hope of a refund, since I had been told I couldn’t cancel, I was hoping to get a refund for all the extras including the second bag.

So I found the phone number of Vueling. At first I repeatedly was told I had the wrong number, no matter what I tried, but finally I got through. After a speech about what to do if I contracted Covid with quite a lot of proof required which I would have been reluctant to mess with if I were deathly sick, they offered me options. They offered me options and more options and more options. But they wouldn’t let me talk to a person. One option that I finally got to was the option to cancel with the warning that under no circumstances would I get a refund. But I didn’t want to cancel until I learned if I could get a refund on any of the extras and if there was any hope of using my cancellation insurance. I tried every choice and the three choices that that choice led to and the three choices that that led to. But nothing led to a choice to drop my extras.

We have all been through this. To save the time it would take to have an agent answer questions we are given options and more options and told to go to the website and we would be taken care of. Everyone does this, even the dentist.

I did go to the website and under manage your booking there were no options. So I went back to the telephone again and then back to the website, round and round. Finally I despaired of ever getting through but thought as a courtesy the airlines would at least like to know that I was not going to use the seat so that they could sell it to someone else. And I was getting stubborn, myself, and a little grouchy. By following one branching line of options I finally got to one that asked if my question had been resolved. No I said softly, not wanting the tone of my voice to make them hang up. “Would you like to connect to an agent?” “Yes,” I said softly, my heart in my mouth. And they hung up. I tried the same route again, was offered an agent, and then was hung up on. I wondered if maybe they were in a different time zone and that there simply were no agents on duty when I called. So I tried calling at different times of the day. Same result, hung up on. And then I did what any sane person would have done long before this and said to hell with them and to hell with informing them about the empty seat. I comforted myself by assuring myself that the seat was so cheap to begin with that the only way to keep the costs down and to run a lowcost airlines, “The Best Low Cost Airline in Europe, 2021,” was to have no agents at all, just a runaround website. And once I accepted that and the loss of the $70, I relaxed and let go.

The next day Vueling sent me an email, one day before my flight was supposed to leave Barcelona. The flight had been cancelled due to Covid restrictions by the government of Morocco. Did I want to change my ticket or did I want a refund? I pushed the refund button and gave them my email address again as they requested so that they could contact me. That was four days ago. I am still waiting.