New name, no credit
Question: I booked my honeymoon through TransGlobal Vacations last year. One of our flights was delayed because of mechanical difficulties, and my husband and I were each given a travel credit of $150 to use within the next year.
Earlier this year I bought two tickets to Las Vegas through TransGlobal, which has since become Funjet Vacations. I sent the travel credits to an address in Milwaukee, as instructed, along with a copy of my marriage certificate to document my name change. According to the terms on the vouchers, TransGlobal agreed to reimburse us each $150 when we made the reservations.
After sending the certificates to Funjet, I received a voice-mail message from a company representative saying they had lost all of our information. My husband called back and got a different story. An agent told him they had our information, but that we wouldn’t receive any reimbursement because we booked the wrong kind of flight — we had chosen a scheduled flight instead of a charter flight. Our travel certificates did not list airlines that were eligible for the credit.
We’re planning to take two trips next year — to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and to Las Vegas — and we’d like to use our vouchers. Can you help us?
– Gena Welsh, Champlin, Minn.
Answer: If Funjet promised you $150 off your next flight, then it should deliver. And if it can’t, then it owes you a quick and clear explanation for its denial. Instead, it offered excuses that left you frustrated.
Normally, airlines don’t hand out certificates when there’s a mechanical delay. But Funjet is a little different. It sells vacation packages that use both scheduled and charter flights (a charter is a flight on which one company buys some or all of the seats at a volume discount and resells them to passengers at a markup). So your contract of carriage — which Funjet calls its “vacation contract” — looks slightly different from the garden-variety airline agreement. (You can read the full copy online.)
According to the contract, for a mechanical delay of between eight and 12 hours on a charter flight, each traveler is entitled to a $150 credit on a future trip that includes charter air transportation. That credit is valid for one year from the date it is issued.
In other words, you have to buy a vacation package with a charter flight — not a scheduled airline flight — in order to qualify for the credit. The vouchers you received from TransGlobal didn’t say which airlines they could be used on because they could only be redeemed on a charter, air-inclusive vacation package. Those terms are clearly stated in the contract and on the voucher.
You could have avoided this misunderstanding if you had called Funjet before making your reservations. You might be forgiven that oversight if TransGlobal hadn’t become Funjet. But any time one company merges with another or changes its name, you should consider verifying that all your agreements are still valid.
I contacted Funjet on your behalf. Your tickets clearly didn’t qualify for the travel credits, and Funjet was well within its rights to deny your claim. But it decided to make an exception for you, and will honor the vouchers.
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