When it comes to reimbursing canceled flight tickets, the AUA parent company Lufthansa is no longer in default. The company reported on Monday in Frankfurt that around 100,000 transactions worth around 43 million euros are still open. Of these, 1200 reimbursement requests with a value of 480,000 euros concern the domestic subsidiary Austrian Airlines (AUA), as it was called on APA's request.
The values correspond roughly to the normal level before the corona crisis and are expected to decrease slightly in the current year, but will never reach zero due to ongoing new cancellations, the German airline company explained.
Due to the numerous flight cancellations, there were significant backlogs for reimbursements at the Lufthansa Group and other airlines last summer. Customers had to wait months for their money, which according to an EU directive would have been due to them within seven days.
The Lufthansa Group had meanwhile switched off the option of simple electronic reimbursement registration in its booking processes. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 3.9 billion euros have been reimbursed to more than 9.8 million customers until Thursday last week (January 21). In some cases, the money only flowed when it became clear that Lufthansa and its daughters in Austria, Belgium and Switzerland would receive state aid.
