SAS - Direct airline refund even for agency bookings

[GDale]

Thought I'd post this for interest & see if anyone else knows of any other airlines that offer this.

I booked some flights on SAS through an OTA and those flights have since had a major schedule change. The OTA is working on an alternative but, having little faith in them, I decided to reach out to SAS as well to see if they could help. As expected, SAS said they couldn't make changes to an agency ticket BUT advised that I could request a refund directly from them if I didn't want to deal with the OTA - all I had to do was fill in this form: Agent Refund

The fact that they offer such a service is unexpected but very much appreciated, as cancellations are truly a hassle with some of these OTAs, and many have also taken to charging high administration fees for the handling of any refund requests.

The only unanswered question for me is how much SAS would refund - I don't know what the true underlying value of the ticket is, and I'm guessing it can be higher or lower than what I paid depending on whether the agency charged over the face value or applied its own discount on the ticket.

 

[GDale]

And success!

Refund form filled in around 24 July. No acknowledgement of any sort received. I got anxious two weeks in and asked for an update via live chat. Live chat agents were horribly rude - literally told me to just wait, that there's nothing they could do, there's no way for me or them to communicate with the refunds team, and when I asked how I could escalate the matter they simply closed the chat - and this happened three times with three different agents. I felt helpless and decided to just wait.

On 29 August I received a notification via the SAS app that my booking had been cancelled. Other than that, no correspondence was received.

On 1 September I received an email asking me to provide bank details to them. Submitted this the next day. The form said the refund would be processed in a week, and it actually happened within that timeframe.

I ended up receiving slightly more than I paid - presumably because the face value of the ticket was higher than the discounted price the OTA had charged.

Very happy that it worked, and still very grateful that they have this option available as I don't think it's very common, but boy did the last 1.5 months feel like a long time!