Air France Accuses Passenger Of Not Taking Flight He Took, Demands €500

Here’s a story that several OMAAT readers have now brought to my attention, as they’re wondering how something like this is possible. I can totally see how this can happen in the first place, though unfortunately the customer service response is where things get super frustrating.

Air France claims passenger skipped segment, but he didn’t

There’s a thread on X that’s getting quite a bit of attention, involving an Air France-KLM ticket, with the outbound flight from New York (JFK) to Amsterdam (AMS) on KLM, and the return flight from Paris (CDG) to New York (JFK) on Air France.

This story is shared by the partner of the person who was impacted by this. According to the claims, upon check-in for the return flight in Paris, the traveler was asked to pay a €500 “out of sequence” fee, as the claim was that he didn’t take the outbound portion of the itinerary.

That would all be fair enough if it were true, but this is the issue — the traveler insists they were both on that flight. Nonetheless, Air France wouldn’t budge, and the agents reportedly asked him to submit proof, so that he could be reimbursed for that.

He sent proof that the Verizon phone connected to the Dutch network near Schiphol within two minutes of when they landed, and even provided timestamped photos of the flight, including selfies with metadata.

Despite the evidence, Air France responded to the refund complaint same day, simply reiterating the initial point — the airline claimed he didn’t take the flight, and therefore they couldn’t provide any sort of a refund. They seemingly just ignored all the evidence submitted.

Now he has taken his situation to social media, in hopes that this gets a resolution…

How could this happen, what can we make of it?

It goes without saying that something like this shouldn’t happen, but with the number of people being transported by airlines, things do sometimes go wrong.

I can totally see how the initial problem happened — for whatever reason, the system just didn’t show him as boarded correctly. I would imagine that the boarding pass didn’t scan correctly, or there was some other system glitch. This is very rare, but with the volume of people traveling by air, stuff like this is going to go wrong every so often.

That brings us to the second question — why is the airline seemingly unable to address this in a satisfactory way? The airline requested documentation, then he provided that documentation, and they they ignored it, and just reiterated that he wasn’t actually on the flight.

Unfortunately this is just increasingly becoming the reality of airline customer service, and it’s frustrating. So much customer service has been outsourced to AI or (at a minimum) people who aren’t actually trained or empowered to make reasonable decisions, and that’s how we end up in these situations.

I would imagine the person who opened the email (if it was a human, and not AI) probably isn’t trained in judging evidence as to whether or not someone was actually on a flight, since I imagine this doesn’t happen that often.

Unfortunately this is one of those scenarios that has the best chance of being resolved by bringing publicity to it. Between the amount of traction the post is getting on X, plus this being picked up elsewhere, I hope this person will be made whole.

Bottom line

A traveler booked a roundtrip transatlantic ticket on Air France-KLM. The outbound went off without a hitch, and upon checking in for the return, the traveler was hit with a €500 “out of sequence” fee, with the claim being that he didn’t take the outbound flight.

The only issue is that he insists he did take the flight. So the airline asked him to submit evidence of having taken the outbound flight, which he did about as well as anyone could. Despite that, the airline refused to budge, just insisting he wasn’t actually on the flight.

This is something that’s extremely rare, but goodness, talk about some frustration!

What do you make of this “out of sequence” ticket situation?