Ticket deletion remains a secret: Switzerland in the dark about flight cancellations

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“We have investigated carefully and do not see a pattern”: this is how a Swiss spokesman begins his conversation with Blick, which deals with involuntary flight deletions of various passengers that Blick has reported in detail.

As a reminder: Franco Blaser’s (58) plane tickets were canceled by phone, and cycling legend Urs Freuler (65) and Leif Øverland’s (61) plane tickets were canceled online. By a third party, without their knowledge. And for Walter Congiu (56), Switzerland canceled his return ticket on its own initiative due to alleged violations of the rules. The passengers in question had no knowledge of this!

Only one case solved

Switzerland agreed to investigate some additional cases in addition to the cases mentioned – Blick also received other letters regarding similar cases. The question was whether something was fundamentally wrong.

In the case of Walter Congiu, Switzerland admits its mistake. In this case, there was double booking. Although the first reservation was deleted, this transaction could not be processed correctly due to a system update. Both reservations remained valid. Therefore, Congiu was considered a “no-show” because he did not board the flight. Secondly, since it was a violation of ticket rules, the return flight was canceled without further ado. At least there were no bad results for Congiu, who received a new reservation for a free flight.

The reason is still unclear

In other cases, uncertainty remains. Swiss defends itself: “When requesting cancellation over the phone, customer service asked for your name and reservation number; this is an industry standard.” Is it enough? “This question affects the entire aviation industry,” he says. However, in the current situation, Switzerland acted in accordance with the law.

When it comes to online cancellation requests, Swiss states that they are not made from an internal Swiss IP address. “We can ignore that the reservations are processed in the Swiss operating environment.” Switzerland’s hands are tied to find out more: “We’ve run out of options.”

Swiss also states that, from his perspective, there has been no recent increase in such cases. The number of cases is extremely small compared to the total number of reservations. Switzerland carried 12.4 million passengers from January to September 2023 alone, and only a few of them had complaints; “Of course, each case is too many,” the spokesman said.

Of course, this does not solve what happened in the mentioned cases. Canceling someone else’s flight doesn’t make the “perpetrator” any money. So it’s a meaningless joke? The lack of a model of action shows this. No clear cause can be identified.

Fight against windmills

According to Swiss, those affected are free to file complaints against unknown persons. However, the chances of success are slim.

When asked by Blick, Urs Freuler stated that Switzerland had refunded him “as a sign of goodwill” the difference in price he had to pay for the Vueling tickets after the Swiss tickets were inadvertently cancelled. It makes 126 euros. Plus a 100 franc travel voucher “for your efforts”.

But the Glarus man is not ruling out the possibility of taking legal action against other injured parties. There is no precedent in this regard in Switzerland. Freuler believes the cases can be traced to security shortcomings.

Source :Blick