By Christopher Elliot
When Jose Portela tries to cancel one of his airline tickets on ITA, the carrier cancels the wrong one. Now he has to pay more for a new ticket. Shouldn’t the airline cover his loss?
Q: I’m trying to get a refund for a ticket on ITA, and I’m hoping you can help me. We had tickets on ITA to fly from Dallas to Barcelona to catch a cruise. My grandson, Jacob, could not make the cruise, so four months before our departure, I called ITA to cancel his flight.
Just before our departure, I checked the remaining three passengers and I found out Jacob had not been canceled by ITA. Instead, it had canceled one of the other passengers who was going on the cruise.
Instead of simply changing the name on the reservation (Jose instead of Jacob), ITA forced me to spend another $604 and refunded Jacob’s ticket which was much less ($268).
This cancellation mistake was ITA’s, not mine. I am requesting a refund of the $335 difference in cost between the original and replacement tickets.
I called ITA and they told me that someone would contact me that day, but they never did. Can you help? — Jose Portela, Dallas
A: ITA should have canceled the correct ticket, but if it didn’t, it should have fixed the ticket quickly.
You could have avoided this problem entirely. It looks like you called ITA to make the cancellation. That’s absolutely fine, but ITA also allows you to cancel a reservation by sending an email to [email protected].
Why would you want to do that? Because you’ll have a paper trail of the cancellation with the correct name of the passenger on the canceled ticket. It looks like the call center agent misunderstood your request and canceled the wrong ticket.
Another thing you could have done was to carefully review the email ITA sent you with the cancellation confirmation. This would contain the correct information. To be extra sure, you could have checked the other reservations to ensure they were still active. That’s something I would highly recommend if you try to cancel by phone.
You’re absolutely right, the best solution would have been for ITA to change the name on the active reservation to the correct one. But airlines claim there are security reasons why that isn’t allowed. Personally, I believe there are also money reasons — because at least in your case, ITA initially benefited from its own error.
I’m not surprised ITA didn’t call you back when it said it would. I’ve heard that promise so many times from customer service agents, and I’m sure it’s just a way to get you off the phone. I’ve never gotten a call back within 24 hours, and I don’t know of anyone who has.
You could have appealed this to one of the ITA executive contacts I publish on my consumer advocacy site, Elliott.org. A brief, polite email might have persuaded the airline to refund you the fare difference.
I contacted the airline on your behalf, and ITA issued a refund of the fare difference plus a $150 future trip credit as an apology.
Christopher Elliott is the founder of Elliott Advocacy, a nonprofit organization that helps consumers solve their problems. Email him at [email protected] or get help by contacting him on his site.
