Last week, I wrote about how Norwegian Wideroe Airlines Codes Mistake Fares as Refundable Tickets. I had a situation where I mistakenly put “Ms.” Instead of “Mr.” on my ticketed reservation when I booked the mistake fare from Los Angeles to Dubai for 1646 NOK ~ $271 USD.
I didn’t think it was a big deal, but I called United to see if they could change it for me. The agent responded with “Well, it wouldn’t matter in the United States, but it could be a huge problem in Dubai when you’re trying to get back.”
I was thinking this thoroughly and agreed with her that it could cause a problem with authorities in Dubai when I’m trying to leave the UAE. There are horror stories about people being thrown into prison for even the littlest thing and I definitely do not want a case of “mistaken identity” or “identity theft”, even if it was a silly error.
She proceeded to change my name on the ticket, but realized that the computer kept saying “error.” She realized that my ticket was not on a United ticket stock which didn’t grant her any powers to change anything on my ticket. She advised me to contact Wideroe Airlines to change it.
I waited about a week to see if Wideroe or United would honor the tickets and it was safe to say that all the tickets were being honored. Last night, I received an e-mail saying that there was a schedule change in my itinerary.
I looked over my itinerary and the schedule changed seemed to only affect the first segment, LAX-SFO. Originally, it was schedule to leave at 6:30am, but now it was pushed back to 6:00am. At the bottom of the e-mail, it said “Please contact us with a reply to this email if this causes problems for you.”
I replied to the schedule change e-mail and said that I was not happy with the new schedule and asked what my options are. At this point, I wanted to see if they would rebook me on the LAX-IAD non-stop instead of connecting to SFO, or perhaps even changing my dates (just like the TLV mistake fare on El Al last year). If I could have any one of these changes, they would probably even help me change my Ms. to a Mr.
I received an e-mail back from Wideroe and they said “We can offer you cancellation and full refund within 10 days.”
It was tough to swallow a cancellation, but in the end they allowed me to cancel the fare. It was a tough proposition as I would earn 19,182 United miles for $271, but there were definitely some downsides. The downsides were leaving orphan miles into another frequent flier account since American Airlines is my primary program. In addition, I had to ride the whole journey to Dubai in coach and there was no possibility for a free upgrade to economy plus.
In the end, I replied to the e-mail and asked them to please fully refund my credit card and cancel my reservation. Almost immediately, I received a refund e-mail with a PDF attachment.
All of my e-mail correspondences with Wideroe have been fast and done in a professional manner.
That’s too bad, but it doesn’t look like they gave you many options. I’m not crazy about Widero after they emailed me at 1 AM two days after I booked my tickets, letting me know I had to submit an alternate form of payment within 2 hours or my ticket would be cancelled. Sure enough, by the time I got the email it was. It’s fine since I got two other flights booked, but the way they handled it wasn’t cool.