There are some days where I can only wonder why on Earth we’re in the business of helping people over at Cranky Concierge. Increasingly, airlines seem to want to punish travel agencies for actually trying to help customers when things go wrong, and today, I’ve got a nasty one courtesy of Turkish Airlines. How ugly was it? We were fined more than $2,000 for helping a client rebook after another airline made a schedule change.
Of course it’s not that simple of a situation, but in the end it’s hard to see why Turkish thinks it is behaving properly here. Between this and my last write-up where Qatar screwed us, you can see why this business can be exhausting.
This all started with a big group of more than 20 travelers heading from the US over to Turkey where they’d meet up and then fly to Italy to continue the trip. One subgroup of four people was already planning on being in Abu Dhabi, so they would just start and end their trip from there to make it easier.
This quartet decided to fly from Abu Dhabi to Turkey to meet the rest of the group, spend a week, then fly on to Italy with the group, spend 3 days, and then fly back to Abu Dhabi. The best option ended up being to issue a ticket on Turkish to go from Abu Dhabi to Turkey and on to Italy. Then we booked a separate ticket for the return from Italy to Abu Dhabi on Etihad, the only airline flying it nonstop at the time. Once again, we made the mistake of trying to be customer-friendly and booked this all in a single reservation with separate tickets. (Yes, we are stopping this practice.)
Not long after ticketing, Etihad decided that it wasn’t going to operate its Friday flights from Rome back to Abu Dhabi (this was for travel in August 2022), so it pushed through the schedule change and just canceled the flight in the reservation with no alternative provided.
The travelers didn’t want to change dates to when the flight was still operating, so the only option was to take a refund due to the schedule change. We did that with Etihad, and had no issues with that airline at all. Then the foursome ended up buying a separate ticket to just go straight back home to the US from Italy so they could avoid adding a stop and making this overly-complicated via Abu Dhabi. That new return was on a separate ticket in a completely separate reservation, so it’s not really relevant to the story.
Everything was fine until Turkish sent us a scathing debit memo saying we owed more than $500 per person in penalties because we had abused the system.
[Debit memo] reason is system abuse and sub-reason is point of commencement change. The agency abused the system by interfering with other airlines while creating the reservation. Fake segments are marked in red in log messages. [Ed note: the “fake” segment was the Etihad flight.]
Abuse process can be identified from log messages not only from [reservation] history itself. We have checked the records of related [debit memos] and it is definite that reservation rules has been ignored while booking. History and log message details have been shared below.
What on earth? There was certainly no abuse here. We booked the tickets that the clients wanted and were planning to fly. It’s not their fault nor our fault that Etihad canceled the flight, and it is perfectly reasonable to refund that when no other option was available. I imagine Turkish may have flagged this because the schedule change happened shortly after it was ticketed in the first place, but that really shouldn’t matter. It’s obvious where the change came from, and it wasn’t from us.
Further, I fail to see how this even impacts the “point of commencement” when they were always starting in Abu Dhabi. That didn’t change. All this did was change the last leg back to Abu Dhabi, or in reality, removed it entirely.
We fought this for months to no avail. Turkish refuses to acknowledge just how ridiculous this whole thing is, and we have been given no option other than to pay it. The total amount is $2,074. Naturally, this isn’t something we can pass on the client since they did nothing wrong, nor did we. So we just have no choice but to pay this and absorb the cost (or potentially try to make a claim on our E&O insurance, though unlikely), all because we provided good service to help a client impacted by obnoxious airline changes.
