Dear Tripped Up,
In March 2024, I was awaiting my $96 Frontier Airlines flight from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Trenton, N.J., when gate agents announced they were seeking 20 volunteers to fly the next day instead, in order to lighten the aircraft’s load. The offer: an $800 credit for a future flight. (Or was it multiple future flights? This was the subject of debate among passengers.) I stepped forward, and was asked to write my email address on a piece of paper, which was passed around for the other volunteers to do the same. The gate agent was patient and polite, but didn’t provide me with any receipt. When I returned the next day for my makeup flight, he was there again, so I asked why I hadn’t received an email with the credit, as other passengers had. He didn’t know. Later, I reached out to Frontier, but the carrier made it very hard to reach a human by phone and sent me emails that didn’t really make sense. I did get a $384 payment — not a voucher — a few days after the flight, but since Frontier still owed me about $300 from a cancellation the year prior, I thought it was for that. Can you help? Linda, Princeton, N.J.
Dear Linda,
Let me get this straight: Frontier’s method for keeping track of volunteers due $800 vouchers was to have them scrawl their email addresses on one piece of paper?
That’s a rhetorical question, because you emailed me the photo you snapped of said sheet, which showed a list of 10 email addresses in a wide variety of handwriting. That’s where I started when I dug into your problem, writing to the other nine email addresses to ask if they had gotten their credits — in some cases for the multiple travelers in their party.
Eight wrote back to tell their stories. All (except you) had received vouchers, although three complained, unprompted, about the scribble-down-your-email-address system, and several grumbled that the vouchers turned out to be for one-time use. One, Dino of Fort Washington, Pa., managed to persuade Frontier to split his family’s four $800 vouchers into eight $400 vouchers.
With help from the documentation you sent, the responses from your fellow passengers and a helpful email back and forth with Jennifer de la Cruz, a Frontier spokeswoman, I have figured out what happened, and gotten you back as much as — or maybe more than — you deserve.
Asking passengers to jot down their email addresses, Ms. de la Cruz wrote, is “not standard procedure.” Instead, gate agents are instructed to find the customer’s reservation in the system, confirm the contact information is correct, and annotate it as voluntarily or involuntarily denied boarding.
The difference is important. Compensation for involuntary denied boarding — bumping — is governed by U.S. Transportation Department rules, whereas airlines can offer whatever they want to seek volunteers. Your name somehow found its way onto the involuntary list, which in this case meant you would receive four times the amount of your original $96 ticket, or $384. That explains the $384 that Frontier refunded your credit card two days after the original flight. (It had nothing to do with the 2023 cancellation.) Frontier has now sent you a $450 voucher to bring the amount to a little over the $800 you were promised.
Ms. de la Cruz also looked into money — $302 to be exact — you say you were owed from that 2023 cancellation. She said your local travel agent erred in what and how much you were due. It was not a refund, the spokeswoman said, but a voucher, and worth only $54 after fees were deducted. That voucher was issued in 2023 and expired three months later. (You claim never to have received it.)
As a courtesy, Ms. de la Cruz said Frontier would send you the $302, and you told me you received an email that promised $302, in the form of check. (For a company that charges you extra if you don’t check in via its app, Frontier sure uses a lot of paper!)
You and several other passengers, by the way, gave kudos to the gate agent. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt that he did not know the Frontier system — as it turns out he did not work directly for Frontier, but for Trego Dugan Aviation, a contractor. It’s a very common arrangement these days — even gate agents wearing airline-branded uniforms are often contractors. This agent was even kind enough to jot down his work email address so you could follow up. Alas, your message to him bounced back, not the first time in this story that a handwritten email address led someone astray.
So what’s the lesson for anyone thinking of giving up a seat for a voucher? Be wary of anything a gate agent promises you verbally, and always politely try to get a receipt or other written evidence. Ask to watch as the agent enters your information, and take a picture of the screen and the agent — with consent. Favor cash over vouchers, which are nearly always time-limited, and ask for a complimentary hotel room if your substitute flight isn’t until the next day.
Some positive news for potential Frontier volunteers: Ms. de la Cruz said (independently of this article) that Frontier has since changed its policies to make vouchers good for more than one flight. That’s a good thing, because as Megan of Doylestown, Pa., one of the volunteers on that handwritten list, wrote to me, “Spending $800 on a Frontier flight is not easy.”
I’ll say, at least if you’re just booking one seat. I played around with the Frontier booking page and — attention North Dakotans — you can, as of this writing, get a last-minute round-trip flight from Fargo to Cancún, Mexico, with extra legroom and checked baggage, for just under $750.
If you need advice about a best-laid travel plan that went awry, send an email to [email protected].
