[christine827]

I have contacted Air Transat customer service and they don't think there is any merit to my complaint, hoping to get some feedback here...

I flew Toronto - London with Air Transat going out on Oct 8 returning on Oct 24 (booked via Expedia). After a very cramped, uncomfortable and sleepless overnight flight to London we were quite eager to upgrade to something with a bit more room for our return flight. Throughout our trip we tried approaching the Air Transat counters at various airports and were told that we had to call to make any changes. We called expedia and were told that we would have to approach the airline. Also tried emailing Air Transat customer service and explained the issue. Response was uniform and blunt - call the North American toll-free number or the local Montreal number. We called the toll-free number and got a recording - the number can't be used outside of North America. So basically if we want to call we would need to call the local Montreal number.

After calling long-distance on 3 different occassions and being on hold for an hour each time we finally got someone the night before our flight out on Oct 23. They told us that nothing could be done and we would have to go to the airport early to make any changes. Frustrating but at a loss, we had no choice.

Long-story short we did not get an upgrade because there were none left even though we checked-in early.

When we returned I emailed customer service to let them know our experience. In their response there were toll-free numbers for Europe listed, albeit for seat selection but toll-free nonetheless. This aggravated me because at no point had anyone cared to mention that there were toll-free numbers that we could have been calling - no matter what I was calling for. There were no European toll-free numbers for Air Transat anywhere on the website or anywhere else that I could find.

Perhaps we are just bitter that in trying to upgrade to better seats we ended up spending the equivalent of one upgrade. I just can not believe that there is no easy way to upgrade seats during a trip except for waiting till check-in...

We were looking for compensation of the phone calls. If we had known of toll-free numbers that would have worked we would have called them.

Any thoughts?

[jimworcs]

Realistically, I don't think they will reimburse you and it is probably not worth the effort of trying to make them. It will aggravate you and I can see no legal basis for a claim. These low cost/low service airlines are very poor at dealing with anything out of the ordinary.

One other point, it seems like you paid a lot for your calls to Montreal. You can buy international phone cards to make calls to the US and Canada for 1p per minute from Europe. Even if you spent 10 hours on the phone it should have cost no more than £6. It sounds like you made the mistake of calling from a hotel phone. That is never advisable!

[christine827]

Thanks jimworcs,

I looked at calling cards before we left but they looked like they were only for calls made from Canada...and then didn't bother looking in Europe. Never would have thought we could have saved that much though. Thanks for the insights, will just move on and plan better next time.

Christine