We had flights cancelled — they gave us a "voucher", not our money back.

The voucher apparently expires so we had to use it or lose it.

Also, the voucher was only good for the ticketed passengers it affected, so we could not use it for one of our daughters, for example.

Also, when we did try to use it we were told it was not valid for many of the seats/tickets we were trying to book. Where it was valid: upgraded (business class or first class) flights, flights with several layovers....

Such bullshit.

I think you just play the call to complain game there. They have to give you like for like; if you bought the flight with a voucher that expires, sure, refund it with a voucher that expires. But if you bought with cash, they should give you cash back.

In my experience (at 800k lifetime miles at this point), the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you're not happy with something, call to complain.

This. The voucher is always their first offer and they will claim it is all they can do. Keep pushing and they will refund your money in the same form of payment you used but they don't want you to know you have that right.

Yea but you have to commit to spending hours on hold with the expectation that they might not cave. I've gone back in forth with airlines before only to get nothing, it's not worth the time often. There should be some law that refunds (and many other business operations) should be automatic and can't be gatekept with several layers of phone systems, lies about only giving you a restricted voucher, and holds of more than X minutes.

I'd imagine this practice of only refunding people that spend hours and hours complaining to customer service is part of what they're getting fine for in the first place. If they're legally obligated to refund you, you shouldn't be getting the runaround like that just to get what is owed to you.

Frontier can be really cheap, I've gotten trips from New York to Miami for $39. It's just not worth 4 hours on the phone for a $39 refund.

Yep. American gave me a voucher that only I could use within 12 months.

If it was the cheap fare, likely around ~$100 for Spirit, then for a lot of folks it might not be worth fighting with customer service for the money.

Depends on how much you make. $100 in college would have put me into the red for a month.

My time, energy, and inner peace is more valuable than the loss I've incurred ($300) and the mental anguish of waiting for hours to get a customer support person to issue me a refund (someone who has probably been instructed to resist giving me back my money)

Vowing to never use their business again (so my loss is limited to a one-time event) and recommending everyone to do the same has worked out pretty well for me --- I can make peace with the experience and we slowly weed out these bad apples from the world

Chargeback works wonders.

They have already determined that they don't care if you fly with them or not, so why not make sure they don't get paid for experience? It is only fair.

Wouldnt you get banned from the airline in the future?

wouldn't that not matter if you vow to never fly with them again?

Seems like that would have no impact since they've already vowed to never fly with that airline again anyways

If I have already decided I will never fly with them again it isn't a big deal.

This works surprisingly well. At least for Visa. I just initiate the chargeback and they sick their dogs on the vendor.

Also, there are potentially plenty of costs that can't be recouped when a flight gets canceled. I have an 8 day vacation coming up with my lodging and rental car prepaid and non-refundable at this point. Delta has already changed my flight once in a way that would have cost me two days at my destination. I was able to reroute and actually ended up with a better schedule than my original flight but if they cancel or change it again, I might get my $800 back for the plane tickets but could lose thousands on everything else.

Large non-cancelable expenses are probably one area where travel insurance can make sense. When you can mostly unwind things in light of travel disruptions, illness, etc. mostly not. (Or, when you can, maybe make refundable reservations even if there's something of a premium.)

Travel insurance can be bizarrely difficult, though. My travel delay coverage covers "mechanical" issues but not "operational" ones. Plane broke? Covered (if you can get the airline to admit it). Pilot couldn't be found? Not covered. Why the difference? No one knows!

It would be nice to have more consumer advocacy and information in this area. I have had two travel insurance claims and they were both like butter, I easily recovered my extra costs. I stuck with that company, but now their COVID rider doesn't seem very good, so I went with another for an upcoming strip. Some offer "for any reason" upgrades... yeah, it's complicated and not a very friendly place to buy products or understand what they cover.

I rarely buy travel insurance but, last time I did, I bought from American Express which seemed more reputable than some of the ones that came up in search results.