Emirates Bans First Class Passenger For Legitimate Credit Card Dispute

If something goes wrong with an airline ticket, a credit card dispute is often your last line of defense, when airline customer service otherwise breaks down. So here’s an interesting example of that, where a passenger filed a credit card dispute with Emirates, only to later be banned from the airline, and told that he was on the hook for the amount disputed.

Emirates cancels flight, refuses to refund ticket

A new FlyerTalk member shares a situation that he’s currently dealing with involving Emirates. Last year, he was scheduled to fly Emirates first class roundtrip from Birmingham (BHX) to Dubai (DXB) to Tokyo (HND) and back, as part of a guided tour of Japan.

He took Emirates’ chauffeur service to Birmingham Airport and went to the check-in counter, only for the airline to announce at that point that the flight was canceled, and advise passengers to contact the airline to rebook. The airline even arranged a taxi for him to go back home.

It’s worth noting that this happened during Dubai’s major floods in April 2024, which destroyed Emirates operations for several days. However, he couldn’t get through to the airline by phone, web chat, etc., presumably due to the volume of people trying to rebook.

Without any rebooking options on Emirates, he decided to book an alternative one-way itinerary on Air France, in hopes that Emirates would refund him for the outbound journey. Eight days later, he was finally able to get in touch with Emirates, and the agent explained that they would reissue the return ticket so that it’s still valid, in light of circumstances. The agent advised him to fill out a refund request form after he returned home, to get a refund for the outbound portion.

Upon returning back home, he filled out the refund request form with Emirates. After a few days, he received a notice that his refund request had been rejected. Long story short, he sent multiple more emails to the airline, but had no luck, as the airline insisted he utilized all sectors of the ticket.

Eventually he wrote that he’d give the airline 21 days to solve this problem, and if he didn’t hear from them, he’d initiate a chargeback through his bank. So that’s what he did. During the dispute, the airline tried to challenge the chargeback, claiming the ticket was fully utilized, which obviously wasn’t the case. The card issuer sided with the traveler, so he got his appropriate refund of around £4,000 (based on the cost of the outbound portion of travel).

Fast forward nearly a year, and the traveler received an email demanding that he pay the amount disputed, or else he’s banned from the airline going forward:

In connection with your ticket XYZ, under booking reference XYZ, we have received a dispute through your bank and the same was also received through our acquirer World Pay. Having reviewed the ticket history, I noted that it was reissued and utilised.

You are required to settle the payment for your ticket in order to enable your travel with us in the future. In such cases, recovery is made only in cash. Please contact our contact centre or the nearest office in order to resolve the issue due to high order value and utilisation of service.

He responded, but heard back nothing. Obviously he’s concerned, not only about being banned from Emirates, but possibly being on some watch list if he enters the UAE, and being accused of fraud, or something.

This is a situation where airline customer service fails

This traveler did absolutely nothing wrong. Emirates canceled his flight due to a natural disaster, and it’s no surprise that he couldn’t get through to an Emirates representative for days. So he (smartly) booked a ticket on another airline. In these situations, airlines absolutely should be willing to refund a portion of the ticket, to reflect the part that wasn’t consumed.

I suspect what’s going on here is pretty straightforward oversight that no one is actually empowered to fix — the ticket was reissued, so when the refund department saw that both of the segments on the reissued ticket were used, they assumed that the ticket had been fully consumed, and this guy was trying to scam the airline, or something. After all, airlines get tons of refund requests, and a lot of them aren’t legitimate.

This is one of the situations where consumers lack the ability to get in touch with a human who is actually empowered to apply logic and fix a situation. Honestly, I don’t know what exactly I would do in this situation, because I don’t think any frontline employee will actually apply enough logic to actually fix this.

Maybe try to file a complaint with UK regulators, in hopes that it gets the attention of a more senior person at Emirates? Or start Googling email addresses of more senior Emirates executives, and send them an email with the subject line “first class passenger accidentally banned from Emirates,” or something? I hate recommending that last idea, since it just clutters up inboxes, but what are the alternatives?

Bottom line

Emirates has banned a first class passenger, after the airline canceled a flight during last April’s storms, with no ways to get in touch with a customer service representative for days. So he booked a separate outbound ticket, and the return was reissued, and he was told to fill out a form to get a refund.

However, the computer rejected the refund request, presumably due to how the ticket was reissued. Therefore he was left with no choice but to file a credit card dispute, which worked out in his favor. Well, at least that was the case initially, as now the airline is coming after him for the remaining ticket amount, and has banned him until he pays.

What do you make of Emirates banning this first class passenger?