Hi folks
You're a paranoid bunch, aren't you?
Thanks for chipping in your opinions, it's been a while since I've been on a forum of any sort, and I forgot how lively it gets
Anyway, the missing paragraph was as follows:
Dear Dr. Buttfield-Addison,
Thank you for your time on the phone today.
As advised, after retrieving all data from our upgrade system as well as reviewing the confirmation emails that were emailed to you upon receiving your offer as well as the confirmation email sent to you once the bidding window had closed and your offer was accepted, we have confirmed that the charges made were charged correctly.
Therefore whilst we appreciate your request for a refund of the overcharged amount, a refund of this will not be forthcoming
I appreciate that you remain disappointed and frustrated with the outcome and apologise once again.
As mentioned, if you wish to escalate the matter, it is your prerogative to do so and if you may escalate the matter outside the airline via an external body.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to let me know.
Kind regards,
Largely irrelevant, as I said, but I appreciate your interest in knowing the whole story! I'm not 100% sure why I redacted that bit of the email in hindsight, but I'm sure I had a reason!
Their argument initially was that nothing could have possibly gone wrong with their backend systems: it took conversations with two seemingly very senior VA people—Florian, and Annettte—before they conceded that it was possible something went wrong on the backend.
They initially wanted to wait days/weeks for their upgrade vendor (who is apparently NYC-based) to get back to them, before they refunded me, but I argued that the correct customer service action was to make it right with the customer before waiting for their investigation to complete. It made no sense to me why they became so hostile initially, and refused refunds, while simultaneously admitting it was overcharged but refusing to say it was a mistake.
Florian and Annette agreed with me, paid me the refund via bank transfer on the same day, and that was the end of that. Florian agreed it was a customer service lesson for them, and agreed to update me when their upgrade vendor got back to them so I could have some non-monetary closure as well.
The people who threatened with closing my VFF membership were from VA, not VFF, and had strong Australian accents. I only started to get any form of traction on VA fixing this when I started getting loud on Twitter (
Dr Paris (@parisba) | Twitter).
As for redacting bits of the email, but not my names -- all my information is online, I am a very public person with my name/phone/etc.
Cheers
Paris