Just how "Guaranteed" is the Guarantee?

Many websites claim to offer the lowest price on a given item or service. Some of them even pride themselves with a guarantee of some sorts promising their customers compensation when their guarantee is not met. Most of these websites will have you jump through many loops before you qualify, but once completed – you are good to go.

Brussels Airlines also boasts such a guarantee. They even promise a %10 discount of the lower fare if you submit a claim for their LFG ("Lowest Fare Guaranteed"). However, before you go ahead and put your money down on their promise, read through this blog. For as almost all things in life: What sounds too good to be true; is too good to be true.

Interested to know how it works? Well here's the rundown.

Introduction:

Brussels Airlines supposedly guarantees that the prices on their website will always reflect the cheapest price for any of their own flights. Makes sense, no? But what if you happen to find the same flight for cheaper on one of the hundreds of booking sites out there? Brussels Airlines seems so certain that this will hardly ever happen, that not only do they promise to match the competitors price (which in essence should technically be their own price, but for some reason did not get updated to their website), they even promise to refund you an additional %10 of the lower fare if you book through them.

Take note that their "guarantee" only covers their own flights. Not codeshares. So you have to make sure that the competitor's site is offering not only the same flight, but that Brussels Airlines is both the "ticketing carrier" and the "operating carrier" for this flight.

They give you just one hour to submit the claim. Rational, being as airfare is subject to fluctuation (although most other websites/airlines guarantee their rates against fluctuation for 24 hours).

Sound too good to be true? It appears they have it all figured out. Based on what I've seen, I don't believe that anyone can qualify for this "guarantee". Here's how this well planned (what seems to me as a) gimmick works. Read, learn, educate others, and most importantly, don't let yourself be fooled!

Part one: Brussels Airlines hides their requirements so well, most people will probably miss one of the details and be declined the price match / refund.

All throughout their website they seem to implicate that all you need to qualify for their "LFG", is a screenshot of a website which offers the same flight for a lower fare. 

In their T&C, you'll read that in order to qualify for the LFG you need to "take a screenshot of the fare quote page showing the lower fare". There's no mention here of any other screenshots that you might need to take:

Same thing in their "Claim form", when they give you the checklist to verify that you've got everything you need, they write "You need to save a screen shot of the website where you found the cheaper fare". Again, no mention of any other screenshots:

Even in the beginning of their detailed T&C they write that "You need to save and send a screen shot of the fare quote page from the other airline website". For the third time, no mention of any other screenshots:

Then again in their "Claim form", you'll find the "Upload screenshot" field. Once again, "screenshot" is written in the singular form, which seems to imply that only one screenshot needs to be submitted.

So where's the catch? A little further down the detailed T&C, you'll find the clause that says "you must supply .. together with a copy of the conditions applicable to the cheaper quote".

Brussels Airlines seems to hope that most consumers will not notice this "small" detail, and based on the other 4 (!) times where the necessity for this additional screenshot has been omitted (intentionally perhaps), most consumers will probably submit the form with only one screenshot and be declined the price match / refund.

Conclusion: Brussels Airlines seems to have found a "legal" way to not honor their "guarantee". They seem to have tried to hide one small piece of the "guarantee" requirements so well, that no one but a more educated consumer will notice it.

Part two: Will I get the price match / refund if I read through all the details, and even managed to catch that last bit of fine print?

So, you're a more educated consumer, or you just read the first part of this blog, and you think that you'll take both necessary screenshots and be good to go? Well, from what I've seen, not so fast.

Here's where, what in my opinion is, unethical business practices, come into the picture.

In Part one above, you'll notice that in order to qualify you are required to take screenshots of both pages. Url links are not enough. How do you take a screenshot? Don't even bother asking google, Brussels Airlines is "kind" enough to guide you through the process of taking a screenshot. In their T&C they write: "How to take a screenshot: .. press the key 'Print Scrn' on your keyboard. Open .. Paint or Word .. and press 'CTRL + V' on your keyboard. Save the document on your computer to upload it to our claim form."

So you, being an obedient customer, follow their instructions to the letter. You take screenshots exactly as you were told, you save the document exactly as you were told, and you go ahead and begin to fill in the form. You only get one hour to do all this… So you set down to work.

You fill in all the necessary information; you get all the way to the "Upload screenshot" button mentioned before, (all the way at the end of course). And surprise!

You cannot upload the screenshots that you just prepared by following their instructions precisely! Why? Because each paste of a screenshot into the Microsoft Word file they instructed you to create, raises its size by 2mb. You would only be able to upload one half of one screenshot in the method they requested! And you must upload a minimum of three! (The "Fare Rules" will be between 2-4 screens long on average).

I could get sued if I would say that this constitutes as a scam, so I won't. But I'll let you readers decide what you call a company who in order to qualify for their "guarantee" instructs you to create and submit a file which is between 6-10MB large, yet have their "claim form" accept only files up to 1mb.

So you go back to the webpages with the competitors' prices, (they probably defaulted back to the competitors start page by now, that is of course if you hadn't closed them yourself after taking the screenshots – and there goes much of your precious time. One hour, remember?), and try the process from the beginning using their other option on how to create a file from a screenshot. You "Open a new document .. in Paint" make a copy of the screen once again, and paste it into Microsoft Paint. This time however, you'll have to paste them into separate files, as there's no such thing as continuous pages in Paint. After a few good minutes, you finally have your MS Paint files. But guess what! They will be 40MB each(!) on average! (Even asking MS Paint to save it on the lowest quality, which is barely legible, [and would of course justify Brussels Airlines if they were to reject your claim because the screenshots were illegible,] will still result in files weighing 6MBs each).

By this time, your one hour timeframe is most probably over. And there goes the supposed (price match, plus the) %10 price adjustment they "guaranteed".

Part Three: You still wan't to keep on trying?

"Ok. I read through your entire post, and knowing all this, I'll avoid the above problems." How? "I'll go back to my word document, as use a nifty feature called "save as Jpeg" (or "export to Jpeg"), or I'll save the file as a pdf (still much much larger than the maximum 1mb requirement) and convert that into a Jpeg".

Wow! Sounds great. You read through all the T&C, and you even manage to create files less than 1mb, and you still have time to spare. I would imagine that you must be one of the select few to have actually gotten this far.

You now have 3-5 files each weighing on or around 200kb. Your total file size is less than 1mb, so you think you're good to go. You go ahead and try to submit the claim… But…

Part Four: Forget about your price match / refund!

Well guess what! You think that you were smart? It appears that the web administrators at Brussels Airlines are smarter than you! The files will not get submitted! Why not? Well remember above in Part one we wrote how the "Upload screenshot" was in singular form? So is the "Upload file" button! And although you might not notice this, but only one file actually seems to go through to their server. They will then claim to have received only one of your files, and reject your claim!

You can possibly try to add all the files to an archive (a .rar or .zip), but from personal experience, I don't believe that would work either, as most servers automatically reject compressed files because of the multitude of viruses that are hidden in them.

Shop smart, and don't fall for something which, in my opinion, appears to be a scam.

Update:          After reading through (the previous version of) this blog, Brussels Airlines' replied that they "fail to understand the factual basis for your allegations .. especially given our clear and unambiguous instructions on our website, which are freely accessible prior to submitting a claim, .. numerous consumers have previously and successfully submitted a claim in the past without encountering any of the alleged "scams" and/or "intentional glitches" you refer to". And "unambiguous and clearly visible instructions on the LFG pages (including instruction on how to make a screenshot) and in the LFG terms & conditions"

I'll let the readers decide whether the instructions on their website are "clear and unambiguous". And whether it is likely that "numerous consumers have .. successfully submitted a claim". My opinion is clear. Go ahead and cast your vote in the poll below.

Disclaimer:    All the facts in this post are based either on copies and quotes from the Brussels Airlines website and/or from actual experience. All the opinions on this blog are my own, and are written with no malicious intent.