Before the Covid-19 pandemic we had booked travel to Mauritius for the entire month of July. The idea is to bring the kids to Mauritius for a very nice summer vacation in paradise. Of course this did not go as plan as the entire world went into lockdown in March and travel everywhere was curtailed.
Not seeing any end in sight for the pandemic, I decided to cancel our flights to Mauritius and seek a full refund in May. At first I was not sure whether we would be able to obtain a refund. As I read more and more articles regarding this topic, such as the CBC article linked here, I felt more empowered to seek a refund. I decided to take a dual prong approach. First I filed a travel insurance claim with TD Visa, and second I requested a refund with Expedia for TD.
I was very encouraged by the fact that Expedia for TD sent me an email in May indicating that my refund is being processed. However, I got heard from no one from May until August. When I look up Air France’s schedule, they have shown that our original flights have all been cancelled. I decided to call Expedia for TD and ask for an update on the matter.
Long story short, it took them until the end of August to refund 4 out of 5 tickets on the itinerary. The last ticket was recently refunded and it my credit card statement yesterday. I made a total of 7 calls to Expedia for TD, the shortest was about 20 minutes, but more often than not it was between 30 minutes to an hour. The good news is that the on hold time was less than 5 minutes for all the calls that I made from August. Here is a summary of all the calls that I’ve made:
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- August 4
- August 14
- August 26 (4 of 5 tickets were refunded at this time)
- September 11
- September 21
- September 22
- September 30 (last ticket acknowledged to be in processed)
- Last refund hit my credit card on October 1
So you can see from above, that a fair bit of persistence is required to obtain your traveler’s rights during these times. If you are still in the midst of finalizing your travel situation that has been impacted by the pandemic, then I urge you to keep at it. It will pay off.