Missed flight: how to get a refund of airport taxes?
This is a little-known possibility: if you miss a flight, you can get your airport taxes refunded even if you have not taken out cancellation/missed flight insurance.Here is a little feedback.
The context
To spend a few days in Luang Prabang in Laos, Anh booked a round trip Chiang Mai – Luang Prabang via the website Kiwi.com, without taking out any insurance.The outward journey went smoothly.On the way back, Anh had the wrong schedule and missed her flight.The company did not make any mistake, the fault is 100% ours.
Airport taxes: what are they?
In addition to the price of the plane ticket invoiced by the airline company, there are various taxes collected by the company and which are used to cover the fees charged by the airport.These taxes can represent 20% of the plane ticket.If you miss your flight, the company will not refund its taxes at the airport and must reimburse you on request.
How to request a refund of airport taxes?
You must apply to the customer service department of the agency or company from which you purchased your ticket.In our case (reservation on the site Kiwi.com), the process is very simple because it is enough to fill out an online form available on our customer area.The process is then quite long since the agency makes the request to the airline. In our case it took about a month.
How much reimbursement can we expect?
It’s quite unclear and I think there is no way to know before the refund.In our case, the return ticket cost us 334 €.We can therefore estimate that the price of the missed flight (the return) is 167 €.For the file management fees, Kiwi.com charges 20 € (I don’t know if we would have had management fees if we had booked directly with the company).In the end, we got a refund of €15.29 or 9.15%.Without Kiwi.com’s file management fees, the sum would have been €35.29, or 21.13%, which isn’t negligible.If the refund period was long enough, the request itself did not take me more than 15 minutes, so I encourage you to try your luck if you missed a flight, it’s worth it.
