Aer Lingus - Taxes and Charges Reclaim

Hi all,

I've read a few previous posts from people who tried to reclaim taxes and charges from Aer Lingus but none which had a satisfactory conclusion. I'd thought I'd relate my own story to see if anyone can dispense some much needed advice.

I purchased 2 return flights to London Heathrow with Aer Lingus but due to unforeseen circumstances was forced to change the outgoing leg of the flight. In retrospect it might have been better to pay the €25 fee per ticket to change the outgoing flight but at the time I thought it would make sense to cancel the outgoing flight, purchase a different outgoing flight from Ryanair and reclaim the taxes and charge for the outgoing flight from Aer Lingus.

The charges for the outgoing flight as stated on the ticket are €49.15. After many weeks of ringing their customer service line and being put on hold for 15 minutes I eventually persuaded them to put the money back onto my credit card. However, they have only repaid €35.76. Can anyone make sense of this? At no stage was there any mention of an administrative charge.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Room 305 - not sure about your taxes question but are you planning to use the return portion of the Aer Lingus flights (i.e. the LHR-DUB flight)- it sounds like you are?

If it's booked as a return ticket on the same ticket (i know it's an eticket rather than a paper ticket but it's the same thing) then if you "no-show" for the outbound flight they'll usually automatically cancel the return leg of your booking.

Maybe you've sorted this with them already - or maybe I'm mis-reading your post ?

@EvilDoctorK
I probably haven't made myself very clear. I've taken the return flight (it was towards the end of last month). There was no problem in that regard, I'm just baffled by their under payment of the taxes and charges.

On their website it clearly states that in the event of a cancellation:

"Airport and Government Taxes and charges are fully refundable."

However, there does seem to be a practise of withholding the taxes by stealth. My initial emails were simply ignored. Once they agreed to transfer the money I still had to ring a further 3 times to get them to actually transfer it. Each time I rang they told me it was transferred but the credit card company said there was no record of any attempted transfers and now they have transferred less than the stated amount for taxes and charges.

Has anyone else any experience of this?

Their "taxes" may include their credit card "booking fee" - this probably isnt' refundable .. not sure what the rest of it would be (Aer Lingus dont have a fuel surcharge)

also some of the taxes stated on your ticket may relate to the return portion of your ticket so would need to be withheld to be paid to the appropriate authorities...

When I checked the applicable taxes & charges on the website one-way from DUB-LHR, they were €19.03 per person. The refund amounted to €17.88pp. So I guess I only really got done out of €2.30.

I've been done worse I guess.

Thanks for your comments guys.