I Was Wrong About Austrian Airlines…

I have flown most of the airlines that fly between the US and Europe and two that have been consistent favorites of mine for their onboard service and comfort have been Austrian and Turkish. I think part of this is due to the fact that they do not offer first class so their business class is top-notch. But, recently, I wrote about how my feelings about both had gone down due to an ongoing situation.

I Was Wrong About Austrian Airlines…

Well, I was wrong about Austrian. My complaint had been that they had kept my money on a reservation they had canceled 9 months ago and that Chase had been unable to get the money back from them, that they were always being told it was “pending” and not refunded.

I kind of let Austrian have it for this because it was just totally wrong that they would play games this long with a customer, especially as I heard that other customers were receiving refunds in a far shorter time. Chase kept telling me, well, you can read all about that in this post here…

In the end, it turns out that I was wrong about Austrian Airlines. It was not their fault at all but Chase’s fault. In fact, Austrian had refunded the flight within 72 hours following the request being made, last July. To me, this is definitely stellar care and service, especially in the midst of having to had cancel so many flights and dealing with so many reservations. (you can read all about how I found this out and why Chase is to blame in this post)

My one complaint with them at this point is that none of the countless reps I spoke with ever told me that a refund had been issued. It was just always that they couldn’t issue the refund without the request going through the booking agent (Chase). After I would tell them that the request had been made, they just said that they couldn’t help but that I needed to ask Chase to ask Austrian.

Now that I am looking back at all this, I believe that these reps were simply giving boilerplate responses after seeing the reservation origination instead of looking into it. If they had looked into it, I could have been saved a lot of time dealing with Chase. But, again, Austrian themselves had done their job and done it quickly.

So, a big thank you to Austrian Airlines and I am very sorry that I was so frustrated with them instead of Chase, the real problem here.

All that being said, I am actually very happy it worked out this way because I have loved flying Austrian and I had not wanted to give them business after this. Now, I am excited to get back in the air on an Austrian plane!

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