Wow, very similar experience with a flight that had to be re-booked for the next day. They swore up and down in Paris that I’d be compensated for the hotel stay, but I couldn’t get them to commit in writing even after a two hour conversation.
It was baffling that they weren’t worn down by that point. I suppose that was their thinking too.
Idk if it’s a French thing, but you can be pretty sure that no customer-facing employee is going to engage its employer by writing anything.
They are probably not allowed to do this and if they do it anyway, it’ll probably cost them their job (or any hypothetical promotion).
It’s a cultural thing here that customers never really meet employees with powers to bypass the established process. It’s not limited to airlines but it’s pretty much the case of any company : the employee you talk to never have any latitude and you always have to escalate if you want to hope anything.
There is a reason we are known to be yelling all the time : it’s often the single and best way to escalate to a more powerful employee.
(btw, the employee isn’t at fault so the best thing to do is to be polite without yelling but insisting until you are bothering them to much in their job that they have to call their manager)
I don't think it's specifically a French thing, it's based on a wider truth: individual is powerless against the organization. Unless there's big money on the line, not many people can and will go great lengths, bear the mental burden and potential costs to go to courts and demand justice. Maybe %99th percentile would, and that's the small cost of doing business the way it is.
Companies having already established legal armies, they must know this very well. If they don't have a reason to care about your satisfaction as a customer, it all comes down to the final stand-off where the company says "so what, whatyougonnadoaboutit" and the customer loses by not being able to participate in the first place. If they had something to lose, customer services would be revamped overnight, but they don't.
I don't expect anything to change unless the will to treat the root causes magically appear one day.
> They swore up and down in Paris that I’d be compensated for the hotel stay, but I couldn’t get them to commit in writing
IMO that's a kind of life-skill that I wish was more often taught and attempted, even if actual success is rare:
A: "I see what you mean, yes, the contract does say we could royally screw you over, but trust me, we would NEVER do something like that to you, valued customer and/or business-partner."
B: "Great! Sounds like we're in total agreement about what we each expect. Just go ahead and tack on a little paragraph saying that to this document, since this process is all about ensuring mutual understanding."
Similar rebooking: less than 24 hours before a flight from Seattle to Naples via Paris Air France says “lol flight canceled good luck as we aren’t rebooking you”
Had to scramble as flights were filling up. On hold for 45 minutes. Eventually cancel our refundable tickets and buy another pair of tickets on AF and have to make up the difference.
AF is now saying that we should have gone through the non working app to reschedule.
And to top it off the luggage didn’t make it to Naples, arriving 3 days (!) later even though there are multiple flights a day.
Ummmm... It sounds like you booked SEA-CDG and CDG-NAP as separate tickets. Huge mistake. In that case, Air France is not obliged by EU law to make arrangements for you to make it for your CDG-NAP flight.
I assume they still gave you one of the three options in [1], but that just didn't work for you.
Are you American by any chance? Air passenger rights are enshrined in EU law [1]. Asking a random employee to commit in writting for something that everyone knows that is mandated by law would just sound weird to them.
Of course the company may try to stall your compensation, hoping you will forget about it, but that's as far as they can go. After a couple of email exchanges they always yield.
It was baffling that they weren’t worn down by that point. I suppose that was their thinking too.