Travelers who saw their flight with Brussels Airlines fall into the water due to the corona crisis have so far asked for 122 million euros in refunds. The airline announced on Friday that it has processed 31 percent of the applications. 210,000 files are still open, but most repayments will be made by the end of October, she promises.
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“We have prioritized the rebookings in recent months, so that the refunds have been slow so far”, says Kim Daenen, spokeswoman for Brussels Airlines. “From now on it will go much faster, we will close the backlog in two months.”
The society says it can now make several thousand payments every day. Most of the repayments should have been made by the end of October. It could only take longer for more complex cases, such as reservations involving multiple airlines.
36,000 flights canceled
The corona crisis had a serious impact on the operations of airlines, and therefore also Brussels Airlines. More than 36,000 flights have been canceled in recent months. The airline canceled an average of 83 percent of the flight program, “which had an impact on the travel plans of three million passengers.” They could rebook, receive a voucher or request a refund.
The cancellations also sparked a call center run, with more than a million calls since the corona outbreak. By way of comparison, customer service received 400,000 calls throughout 2019.
Apologies
“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by congested call centers and delays in our response time, especially for ticket refund processing,” said Dieter Vranckx, Brussels Airlines CEO, in a press release. “But we assure that any passenger entitled to a refund who has applied for will be refunded within the next few weeks.”
The Lufthansa group, to which Brussels Airlines belongs, said at the end of August that it had already repaid more than 2.5 billion euros in tickets. The files of 5.6 million passengers had already been processed, the backlog for the entire group was still 1.2 million tickets.
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