Can we get back a £400 fee after missing a first-leg flight?

Q My wife and I missed our first flight from Queenstown in New Zealand on our way back to Scotland due to not having a transit visa for Australia. We had a connection of 8h 5m between flights, and it turns out that a visa is needed if you are changing planes in Sydney and have over eight hours between them.

We had made the complete booking on the Emirates website and were not warned about this. We tried to buy visas online but had a “problem with this site” message. Then the flight left without us.

We paid an astonishing £805 between us for seats on a Virgin Australia flight in order to catch our intended Sydney to Dubai then Dubai to Edinburgh flights. We called Emirates from Queenstown Airport to inform them we would be continuing with the original journey, but got charged £200 each for the amended booking. Can you recommend any next steps that may see us getting our “amendment fee” of £400 back?

Jim H

A I am sure it doesn’t feel like it, but you were fortunate to be charged only £400 (on top of the £805 you paid to leave New Zealand).

First, as you appreciate, responsibility rests with you to have the right paperwork to comply with each country’s migration rules. I agree that in a perfect world, airline websites would flag up all the possible pitfalls. But that would be a Herculean task and instead airlines put the onus on the passenger.

A good human travel agent would, I hope, have alerted you to the requirement (and possibly found you a more reasonable transit time so that the rule was irrelevant).

Next, having missed the original flight, you did the right thing by calling Emirates. But reclaiming anything will be difficult. First, Emirates had the right to cancel your entire itinerary once you were “no-shows” for the flight from Queenstown. So you might have had to pay for the whole Sydney-Edinburgh again. This is why I regard you as fortunate.

Next, airlines are extremely sensitive about what they call “tariff abuse”, which involves passengers skipping part of a journey (typically the first leg) in order to benefit from a lower fare. Therefore they insist on recalculating the fare, and also adding a charge, for any straying from the agreed trip.

I suggest you put it down to expensive experience, and consider consulting a human travel agent for your next adventure.

Every day our travel correspondent Simon Calder tackles a reader’s question. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder