Aer Lingus customers having to pay upfront to switch cancelled flights

Passengers forced to rebook flights cancelled or facing cancellation because of the Aer Lingus dispute have been warned they must pay any price difference between old and new journeys upfront and then wait to be reimbursed by the airline.

The cancellations are as a result of industrial action from the Irish Air Line Pilots’ Association (Ialpa) in a dispute over pay.

Almost 500 flights have been cancelled since the action started 10 days ago, with the travel plans of 75,000 people thrown in to disarray as a result.

The airline has repeatedly said that anyone impacted by flight cancellations “will be given the option to change their flights for free. They will also be able to claim a refund or voucher.”

However, changing flights to alternate dates can incur significant costs which passengers have to bear before being reimbursed by the airline.

While Aer Lingus said it was working to ensure people were not left out of pocket for too long, lags of several days are possible, with travelling passengers warned they will need to have sufficient funds to cover any additional costs.

One Aer Lingus customer who contacted The Irish Times said that when he tried to rebook a flight home from London to Dublin after his original flight was cancelled, he had to pay more than €300 for new tickets on top of the price he had already paid.

“I had booked return flights for myself and son for a trip later this week to London to take in a bit of Wimbledon,” he said. However, Aer Lingus cancelled the return flight as part of their second batch of cancellations last week.

“I immediately rebooked a later flight on the same day back from Heathrow which hadn’t been cancelled. Having said initially as I navigated the page that there would be zero transfer fee, they then charged me €340 for the two of us to book on to the later Aer Lingus flight,” he said.

He noted that he would have to submit a reimbursement request but pointed out that “not everyone will have a few hundred euro to cough up on the spot. If it was a family of four or six trying to rebook a flight from Rome you can imagine they’d have to paid a grand-plus to transfer and then apply for reimbursement or face being stranded in their destination.”

[ Aer Lingus and pilots await court recommendation on pay row ]

Mark Dodd was another passenger impacted by the dispute; he had booked a flight with Aer Lingus for next Monday. While the flight is still scheduled to depart on time, he felt he could not risk cancellation so booked alternative flights with Ryanair.

Last Wednesday, he applied for the refund voucher for the outbound flight and immediately received a case number from Aer Lingus. After several days of silence he called the airline and was told it could take around seven days for the refund process to be concluded.

“As has been outlined by Aer Lingus since the beginning of this dispute, we are waiving any change fees and customers are being asked to submit a refund request for any fare difference,” a spokeswoman for the airline said.

She said about 75 per cent of customers were having their refund requests processed within 24 hours and added that the airline’s customer care team is “actively working on processing the remainder as quickly as possible”.

“We apologise to customers for the serious disruption being caused by the industrial action and appreciate that this is a very difficult time for them,” she added.