John tried to use travel vouchers to pay for a flight, but the airline only accepted one of them and charged the rest to his credit card. Now he can’t get his money back no matter what he tries.

He writes:

I read the Consumerist all the time, and I always hoped that I would never have to be on that site… However, being the normal average everyday consumer, I’m definitely bound to get screwed sooner or later. So here’s my story involving Delta and their refund department.

I needed to purchase a ticket to San Francisco this January for a trip. I had two vouchers, one 400 dollar one, and a 86 dollar one. The ticket price was 416 and change, so there wasn’t a problem. The first issue I had was with their online booking system… in order for me to even input the vouchers as a method of payment, I had to first put in my credit card number (this was after I called their customer service department). After that, there was an area where I could put in multiple vouchers and select which voucher I wanted to use first, which was second, etc… I put my 86 dollar one as first, the 400 dollar one as second, and was done with that. However, to my surprise, they charged me 333.20 on my credit card. Well, I called customer service, they saw what happened, and decided to refund me the 333.20, reissue the 86 dollar one, and take my 400 dollar voucher with me paying the remaining 16 dollars from the credit card again. This is where things got worse.

After 2 weeks or so of not seeing the credit back, I called customer service again. Due to an issue on their side, they never sent the request into their refund department. I can deal with that… I corrected their mistake, and the service rep was very helpful in contacting the department and making sure they got all my info. Next thing I know, the refund department calls me and says I need to sign a letter and return it to them to get my refund. I received the letter, and faxed it back to them. This was around the end of February…

Now comes today, and I still haven’t seen the money or heard a peep from them. Everytime I call their service number (800-847-0578 option 1,3,1) they quote “Due to extremely high call volumes, we are not taking calls at this time.” This has been going on for three weeks (I’ve called everyday). 333 bucks is quite a bit of money not to have in my pocket, and I felt that I’ve been more than patient enough waiting over 2 months. I tried going the chargeback route, but the visa agent said they can’t do anything since a voucher was involved. I was going to go with EECB, but I’m not sure if that has any effect. Any suggestions?

Here’s the go-to link for EECB contacts. Any tips for John on handling Delta?

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