OTA won’t pay refund – any chargeback advice?

[roger]

I have a flight cancellation and OTA with whom I booked is being less than helpful to provide refund or state in writing that following flight cancellation by the airline I will be provided with the full refund.

What are my options? Do I have to simply wait for months and months (they say minimum 12 weeks) for the refund to come back to my account?
Is chargeback an option?

• This topic was modified 54 years, 8 months ago by .

[Laura]

Is it Expedia? Prepare for a lot of pain. I think they took 6 months to process my refund 🙁

[roger]

Not expedia, it is some run of the mill OTA with an overseas call centre which is being less than helpful.

Does anyone know if I can use MCOL or Travel Insurance rather than continuously chasing the OTA for the refund.
Don’t see any point of chargeback on my card as it falls on bit of lopsided argument where OTA is not giving clear answer however airline customer service over phone is advising the ticket will be refunded if the OTA goes back to them which I doubt OTA is interested to do or even understand what they are supposed to do.

[Lady London]

For goodness sake do the following :-

(1) Never book a flight through an OTA again. It just wastes yours and our time when stuff like this happens.

(2) Go straight to chargeback. You haven’t received what you paid for. Endof. Have a list of dates and times of all the times you’ve contacted the OTA about this, ready when you contact your card.

To do anything else will just waste more time.

[ChrisC]

Yes to MCOL if they have a UK office.

Insurance will expect you to have tried other remedies first including chargeback.

Chargeback usually gets a companies attention because if your CC agrees to your claim the just deduct it from their next payment to the company directly hitting them in their pockets. And they also expect you to have tried to get the refund from the OTA first.

[can]

I did MCOL, and was partially successful despite that OTA went bust

[The real Swiss Tony]

Lady London wrote:

(2) Go straight to chargeback. You haven’t received what you paid for. Endof. Have a list of dates and times of all the times you’ve contacted the OTA about this, ready when you contact your card.

To do anything else will just waste more time.

As I understand it, chargeback doesn’t apply for OTAs once the ticket has been booked, paid for and issued. When I went through this process a couple of years back, I couldn’t find any evidence that the transaction had been completed between the OTA and the airline and fed this back to the credit card company.

[SamG]

Yes – there is a gap when using credit cards and a third party / agency which you need to be careful of – an OTA can successfully defend it as they are not the ones providing the service. Another reason to steer clear and go direct!

In my (bitter) experience you’ll get your money eventually but have to be patient over it

[meta]

If flight is cancelled, OTA has essentially sold you an invalid product/ticket. I successfully argued that with Amex in June 2020 when Expedia refused to refund my TAP ticket. I did do S75 though rather than simple chargeback.

(hope this doesn’t disappear into the ether!)

[Lady London]

Btw it’s much more helpful to name misbehaving OTA’s.

[SamG]

meta wrote:

If flight is cancelled, OTA has essentially sold you an invalid product/ticket. I successfully argued that with Amex in June 2020 when Expedia refused to refund my TAP ticket. I did do S75 though rather than simple chargeback.

(hope this doesn’t disappear into the ether!)

I had a very enlightening conversation with HSBC about this when Flybe went bang and I had an OTA flight with them. As Flybe were not involved the debtor-creditor-supplier relationship was broken and HSBC were no longer liable. A chargeback to the OTA was not appropriate as they were only an intermediary and had passed the funds to Flybe

They did actually pay on that occasion but the agent advised me to pay the supplier directly as a main cardholder wherever possible to have the best chance of a successful claim in future

[Froggee]

I also realised this was true when I had to try and get money back from Expedia. As per Which:

https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/my-travel-company-has-gone-bust-what-can-i-do-aXoIh4n6NWZx

(See it on s75)