While passengers around the world are struggling to get refunds from airlines that have canceled their flights due to the coronavirus, one JessicaTam over on Australia Frequent Flyer (you need to have a (free) account to access the forums).found that Qatar Airways refunded her 10,000 times the amount she was due!
Passenger Received a $20 Million Refund – 10,000 Times the Actual Amount!
What would you do if you had $28 million (AUD / $19,500,000 USD) show up on your credit card? Jessica jokingly asker her fellow forum members if they knew of some small country for sale. 🙂
Why Did This Happen??
What had happened, evidently, was that Qatar had accidentally refunded her the amount in AUD that she was due in the original ticket fare that was in Indonesian Ruiah. That amount? It was 28 million IR.
Instead, they refunded her $28 million AUD since they computer converted at a rate of 1IR=1AUD instead of the correct rate.
In the end (as in the next day), of course, Qatar Airways took all of that back and refunded her the appropriate amount – minus $50 (AUD). This is due to the currency exchange differences from day to day. The IR apparently climbed a bit in value from the time she had made the purchase and the refund had been made.
One thing we can take from this is that Qatar Airways does have $20 million in accounts to refund to passengers. How many of you are still waiting on refunds from Qatar Airways? After all, they are a little flush with all those passengers that took advantage of the generous change policy they had offered.
[…] (HT: Running With Miles) […]
Just a small correction – the currency difference was from the time I purchased the ticket to when the refund came though. The refund itself didn’t suffer any penalty by being in the wrong currency (AUD/IDR)
Thanks, Jessica, and great story!
Qatar should then have done the decent thing and given her the $50 currency loss for her troubles from their error
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