Purchase is reversed: airlines cancel cheap tickets – even though there were free seats
Against the background of the current staff shortages, passengers must be prepared for cancellations at short notice. The airlines may be trying to disadvantage customers with cheap tickets compared to customers who pay higher prices.
Actually, when airlines cancel connections, they have to offer replacement transport at the earliest possible time under comparable conditions. However, he was denied this, reports Focus reader Erwin Winkler, who had booked a cheap Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Barcelona. The flight was canceled by Lufthansa. Using screenshots from Lufthansa’s online offer, Winkler complains that tickets were still available for the day of travel in question, albeit at a significantly higher price.
“Lufthansa aims to offer all passengers who are affected by a flight cancellation an alternative travel option,” the group said on request. Winkler could have simply contacted the service hotline and asked for a rebooking. says Winkler, but got stuck in the queue on the overloaded hotline.
Flight chaos: Cancellation of flight tickets is not an isolated case
It is not an isolated case, according to Oliver Buttler from the consumer advice center in Baden-Württemberg. “We see again and again that providers cancel the flights of customers who have booked cheap tickets when capacities are tight,” said the consumer advocate. Lufthansa is not the only one to do this. In some cases, flights with the same flight number on the same routes were started following cancellations. “The suspicion almost arises,” says Buttler, “that passengers are being kicked out to get higher prices.” Depending on the situation of the specific case, the consumer advice center checks warnings. “Should such cases become more frequent,” says Buttler, “we would have to consider whether and, if so, how we would take legal action against them.”
The service provider Flightright makes a similar statement. Lufthansa’s approach seems to have a method, says Flightright passenger rights expert Claudia Brosche. The company would have some cases that justified this assumption. An example is a bachelor party. The return flight from Barcelona to Munich was canceled for all participants. “Some were rebooked on earlier flights, others only received cancellation notifications.” In 2019, Lufthansa only offered no alternative transport for every sixth canceled flight, and in the current month it has already offered every third flight . This is all the more unfortunate as the company’s hotline for questions about rebooking is very difficult to reach.
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