My experience shortening Delta's "30 to 90 day" refund window

Delta Airlines is currently swamped with refund requests. I have one out there too. It is often taking over 30 days before you see it. That being said, they are trying to do the right thing with refunds and credits. This is an unprecedented situation for them too. Try and be patient if you can.

The cruise industry has 90 days to refund your money, or at least Norwegian does. I've kind of lost my taste for cruising and plan to set the money aside for an eventual trip to Europe, which I'm thinking now will not be until 2022 with RS. Until then there are a lot of places to see in the U.S. that I would still like to visit, but even that is a tenuous situation. I guess if there's a spike somewhere I can just turn my car around.

The customer service rep (CSR) I had yesterday was a superstar. I have another refund that has been stuck in Delta refund purgatory for 6 weeks. She offered to check on it for me, and she helped speed up its processing, which is far more than any other Delta Twitter agent or phone agent has been willing to do for other delayed refunds — all others have just rattled off a canned answer from the script given them.

Of note, she said refunds that don’t process immediately and go into the refund queue are taking about 60 days to process right now.

The CSR earned many compliments and a “Job Well Done” award from me (Delta gives some frequent flyers 4 JWD certificates each year to give to employees who provide good service; they can redeem them for merchandise). She said I made her night!

Got in Delta's online queue the day after they notified me that our PDX-ZRH flight was cancelled. In 30 business days (to the day) the refund was made to my credit card.

My credit card balance this morning reflected the 2 refunds -- 2 days after my phone call.

Nicely done, Dave. Literally, "nicely" done. It's wonderful when you can get what you are entitled to and make a "friend" at the same time. That's a skill!

Dave, you are the envy of us all. You certainly have some mad skills.

Mad skills?

Not so much. New tactic. The scorecard before this phone call was 1 quick refund and 3 slow, arduous refunds. Things different this time:

1. Called the refund line instead of the frequent flyer line
2. Pulled the DoT May enforcement notice into the conversation early and went back to it when its guidance was not followed.

Well, I learned something here. I did not know that there was a dedicated refund line, so thanks for posting that!

I filed for a refund on April 18. I'm still waiting, b/c apparently it takes awhile to refund if there was a split payment (credit card + gift cards in this case). I FINALLY talked to someone yesterday after waiting for six hours and they assured me that the refunds for my week of filing are almost ready to be done (which is a significant change from what they said last time). With any luck, I could see my refund by the end of next week.

Not holding my breath on that one, but definitely going to keep this phone number handy. Thanks!!

aquamarinesteph--

My refund that I've been waiting on for 6 weeks is a credit card + gift card purchase. My super helpful CSR explained that those go into the regular refund queue (about a 2-month wait right now for the refund to be worked), only to be kicked into a second queue for complicated refunds when the queue #1 processor looks at it; the second queue has a 4-5 week wait right now. So, complicated refunds are taking about 3 months to work. It sounds like the CSR's time table is about right if you get your refund in the next week or two.

The CSR wasn't able to work the refund for me immediately, but she at least went ahead and moved it from the first queue to the second queue, which is progress.