Oh my God, the stress!
On Thursday we found out that Zoom Airline had suddenly gone into receivership. Guess what airline my stepdaughter and friend are visiting us on in a couple of weeks – yes Zoom!
We emailed her but she did not answer, we then phoned her, but it just went to voicemail. Then hubby tried contacting her via Facebook and told her to turn her phone on. She did and when we told her what had happened and that she now had no flights and had possibly lost her money she was devastated. Not sure if it was the loss of a holiday, the loss of money or the possibility of not seeing us!!!
We told her not to panic at the moment and that whilst she was at work we would do some research and find out what was going on.
There was no way the existing flights were going to happen so I started looking for new flights and found the prices to be twice that which they paid due to the closeness of the timing. I did however find Air Canada flights that were just 100GBP more between them which was the best I could find.
We then found out they had paid via debit card and would not get a refund and they did not have enough money to rebook the new flights. I asked which debit card and found that it was a visa debt card. When I researched this I found that this was in fact treated very similar to a credit card and you could actually get your money back. So armed with this info we go back to her and told her to contact her bank to confirm this was the case.
Another phone call later it turned out that yes they can get the money back but it could take four weeks, but luckily the bank felt sorry for them and gave then a loan to cover the new flights until they got their refund. So new flights were booked and they are now back on track to visit early next month. PHEW!
One very stressful evening for all of us.
On a lighter note we are still attracting the butterflies with our butterfly bushes. I took these pics of a monarch butterfly who paid a visit today.
