Steer clear of Cheapoair!!

Hereby I urge all the fellow travellers, BE VERY CAUTIOUS IF YOU WISH TO USE CHEAPOAIR. Before you hand over your hard earned cash, google “Cheapoair complaints”, look at the sheer volume of the terrible feedbacks from other customers, and make your own mind up.

My experience of dealing with Cheapoair is simply the worst ever, not only in travel industry but among any business I had ever purchased from. I still couldn’t get my refund back, and Cheapoair just completely ignored my query. Wish I did my research before booking!

I booked via Cheapoair a return flight to Valencia, Spain in March 2013. On 27 July Cheapoair emailed me saying the flight schedule had changed, meaning I will have to wait in my connection airport for 24 hours rather than the original 1 hour. This is of course not acceptable so I called Cheapoair and they agreed to issue me a refund.

But this is just the start of the terrible customer experience. The VISA Debit card I used for booking had expired, and the newly-issued card has a different number. Cheapoair emailed me on 7 Aug saying that they cannot refund to the old card, then emailed again on 18 Aug saying they cannot refund to the new card either. During this period I had kept trying to call them, but the average waiting time was 45 minutes, and 3 times the agent answering hung up upon hearing that I am calling regarding a refund!! I had also sent emails to [email protected] explaining the situation but no one ever responded.

Eventually on 21 Aug I spoke to an agent named Ramsy and explained the situation. Ramsy spoke to his supervisor and came back and said I need to directly contact the airline to ask for refund because Cheapoair cannot do it. I found this is getting ridiculous, but nevertheless called the airline and my bank. Unsurprisingly, the airline stated that refund should be dealt with by agency, and my bank could not understand why Cheapoair is unable to refund to my old card, as this is quite a common situation and the bank can easily put the refund back to my account. All just seem to be excuses to make things difficult for me to get the refund.

So I called again and spoke to Ramsy, who said he will arrange his supervisor to call me within 48 hours. Of course, that didn’t happen.

On 26 Aug I received a voice message on my phone and an email from a Cheapoair agent named Sharon but all she did was to give me the general phone number of the airline and told me to contact the airline directly. I replied to her email repeating all the points I already raised to Ramsy – I have contacted both the airline and my bank, and refund should be dealt with by agency, and refund should be issued onto the old card. And I asked for the supervisor’s name who came up with the idea of telling the customer to contact the airline directly. Again no one ever responded.

My points are:

1) I work in Finance myself and I do not believe Cheapoair’s statement that they cannot issue refund to an expired card or a new card. For the payment processing systems, there is always a supervisor overriding function to enable refund to expired card or a different card. Alternatively, the billing department should also be able to issue a cheque as means of refund. This has been confirmed by my bank. It is very common for customers to have a new card with different number due to expiry / lost. There are several questions I would ask Cheapoair: are they willing to confirm that their payment system does not have overriding function to issue refund to expired cards / different cards? Why their billing department cannot issue refund by cheque? Have they never come across similar situation in the past? This either is a faulty operational process, or someone within Cheapoair is telling a lie in order to avoid issuing the refund.

2) It is ridiculous for Cheapoair to ask customer to directly contact the airline for refund, because we as customer purchase the service from Cheapoair, of course the customer service issue should be dealt with by Cheapoair. It just seemed to be a deliberate attempt to divert customer’s attention. The question I would ask Cheapoair, is that for all the customers who have a new card due to expiry / lost, does Cheapoair always tell every single customer in such situation to directly contact the airline for refund?

Based on reading other customers’ experience with Cheapoair, it appears that this company does make things very difficult for customer to get refund.

I had already submitted a formal complaint to Best Business Bureau, also I am posting my experience on numerous complaint / travel websites and forum. I will be updating my posts on weekly basis until I get a response from Cheapoair.

And I believe all the fellow travellers have the right to know about my experience (as well as other customers’ experience) with Cheapoair. I hope this will help you make up your mind about this company before losing your hard earned cash.