Two Abuja residents whose air travel with Dana Air could not materialise before the company’s operational licence was suspended have not got their N401,940 ticket fee back since April.
One of the passengers who preferred to be identified as Adeyemi, her first name, told FIJ that she and her husband booked an Abuja-Lagos round trip ticket with the airline on March 2 for a journey they intended to embark on between August 1 and 13.
Less than a month after their ticket was issued, the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) suspended the airline from operation owing to safety concerns.
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Adeyemi’s flight ticket.
“As a precautionary step, and in accordance with Section 31 (7) of the Civil Aviation Act 2022, the Authority has imposed a suspension on your air operator certificate (AOC) with effect from April 24, 2024, at 23:59 to allow for a thorough safety and economic audit,” an April 24 letter signed by Chris Najomo, the NCAA acting director-general, read partly.
Since then, Adeyemi’s money has not been refunded. She submitted a refund request stating her booking reference number VQYCLY via the airline’s WhatsApp line, yet it has not been processed.
“We booked in advance to travel by August. But before August, the airline was suspended. All efforts to get a refund have not yielded any result,” Adeyemi told FIJ on Wednesday.
“They don’t have any physical office to reach them again. They are very slow in responding to my messages on WhatsApp. And if they respond, they will say they are still attending to me, which is the same thing they have been saying since April without any good outcome.”
Eight months on, the airline’s customer service agents keep telling Adeyemi via WhatsApp they are working on her request.
A screenshot of one of the airline’s responses to Adeyemi.
“Your refund request is currently being worked on,” a customer service agent said in a January 7 response to Adeyemi.
Attempts to interview the company for this story were unsuccessful at press time. Kingsley Ezenwa, the airline’s head of corporate communications, neither answered his call on Tuesday nor responded to a text sent to him.
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The airline continues to hold on to millions of customers’ money despite a two-week timeframe the NCAA issued to it in August to attend to all refund requests.
“This means that a two-week timeline was given because the meeting was held last week and feedback is expected next week. We will reach out to affected passengers,” Michael Achimugu, the NCAA’s director of public affairs and consumer protection, had told FIJ.
In an update, FIJ showed that the airline had missed the deadline the regulator issued.
The post Dana Air Yet to Refund Customer’s N401,940 Ticket Fee 8 Months Later appeared first on Foundation For Investigative Journalism.