In June 2020, as the Coronavirus Pandemic began to recede in intensity, lockdowns to be eased worldwide, and planes to take to the air again, we judged the time was ripe to finally book a flight to return home to Europe after months of being stranded in Asia. We ended up booking a flight with Etihad Airways via a dodgy travel agency by the name Bravofly. I had never heard of Bravofly before, but since we stumbled upon their site utilizing Skyscanner’s search engine, we judged that it should be fairly safe to book with them (after having been booking flights on Skyscanner for as long as I have flown, I never ran into any unpleasant issues in the past). This time, however, booking with Bravofly proved a grave mistake.
Have you found yourself in a similar situation dealing with Bravofly? Have you managed to get a refund from them or are still trying to? You are welcome to let us know of your story on the comment section at the bottom of the page, so becoming a part of a collective effort that we could possibly make against this fraudulent company.
Days after we booked our flight and received the automatic confirmation mail by Bravofly, we received the following notification:
Dear dimitrios,
Unfortunately, the airline has cancelled and your itinerary is no longer valid.
If you would like to find an alternative flight, you can contact the airline directly on +44 (0)345 6081225]. The airline is required to assist you in this situation.
If you would like to request a refund, please respond to this email within the next 72 hours or call us on one of the numbers below.
Please note that:
• refunds are at the discretion of the airline and, although they are usually processed on the basis of a return ticket, you may only be reimbursed for the part of the trip which is affected.
• if we do not hear from you, no refund request will be forwarded to the airline.
• this communication applies only to the flight and has no effect on other services which you may have booked. Any request for the modification of additional services will follow the fare rules of the provider as indicated in the confirmation email.
• Your refund will be credited to your account as soon as we receive the funds from the airline, which could take up to 2 months.
We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause and we remain at your disposal.
Kind regards,
Customer Care Team
Bravofly
+44 203 499 8517 , 24/7
(National landline number, costs depend on the provider)
If you have any questions regarding your trip, check out our Need Help area and to view your trip details, request assistance or change your booking, please log in to your account area, My Bravofly, via our website or app.
Here I get mad. If I would like to request a refund? Hello!!! Well, no, it didn’t actually occur to me, but since you mention the possibility… Are we even serious?
As for the “the airline is required to assist you in this situation” part, all our attempts to get in touch with Etihad have been met with utter disregard and disrespect: strict silence. I will write a separate post about my interaction with Etihad and its attitude in this hard situation, and I will link to it here. The present post, however, is going to be devoted solely to Bravofly.
I replied to their cancelation notification as follows:
I do request a full refund for both flights my trip consists of. I have checked with the airline and they do not have any alternative flights on schedule. Please inform of the procedure and applying regulations the soonest. I need to have the money back into my account within the next couple of days at most. It would be highly appreciated if this could be resolved quickly and smoothly. Thanks. Waiting for your reply soon.
And the show goes on…
Hi Dimitrios,
Thank you for your email.
We kindly inform that we will amend your request to the related department.
For further queries we remain at your disposal.
Kind Regards,
Customer Care Team
Bravofly.com
Hi again, still waiting for an answer and the refund which we need asap to book another flight. Has anyone received our request? Is there any human working there? Thanks.
Hi Dimitrios,
Thank you for your email.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
We kindly inform that our team is still working on your request and as soon as we have a confirmation you will be notified.
For further queries we remain at your disposal.
Kind Regards,
Customer Care Team
Bravofly.com
Still working on my request??? Inconvenience??? Hello! There is nothing to work on here. You must simply refund the payment for goods you failed to deliver. This should be automatic. The payment should be refunded no sooner than the cancellation notification is sent out. There should be a rule of the kind “If flight is canceled – refund payment” on your algorithm. Do please stop kidding around, show some elementary decency and professionalism, and refund asap. Otherwise I will have to proceed with filing a payment dispute to my credit card company and taking every legal route available to pursue justification, as well as exerting every possible effort to disparage your firm (scam) and exposing its disgraceful, fraudulent activities, in all directions and by all means at my disposal, online and offline. Thanks.
Hi Dimitros,
Thank you for contacting us.
Hereby to inform you that your request has already been registered regarding your refund and we will get back to you with updated information as soon as possible.
Given the unprecedented circumstances in which we find ourselves globally, our management timelines, and those of our suppliers, are being strongly impacted.
We hope you understand that the current situation makes normal case management impossible for both our providers and us.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.
Kind Regards
Customer care
I do very well understand the unprecedented circumstances. It’s these exact circumstances – being stuck on the other side of the globe and needing my money to book a flight home urgently – I beg you to consider when I ask you to give me back my money, which is nothing extraordinary. I do also understand that travel agents and airlines have found themselves in a dire situation, but ripping off their customers is definitely not going to prove the right tactics for them in the long run. It is, in fact, this very attitude – the degree of sensitivity, supportiveness, and respect – businesses are going to show to their customers at these hard times that will define which companies are going to survive this. Your company is not on the right track at all. Do please get back to me with something concrete. That my request has been registered does not matter to me, and updated information is not what I need. What I need is my money back into my bank account urgently. Give me a date. When exactly am I to receive my money?
Hi Dimitros,
Thank you for your e-mail.
I can see that your request has been received, and is awaiting management by our team. We are experiencing an increase in contacts due other current worldwide events.
Therefore it may take us longer than normal to respond.
Our teams are working hard to respond as soon as possible, prioritising those passengers due to travel imminently.
Thank you for your patience
This has been our email correspondence so far. I will keep updating this post with all that is to follow until our refund case is resolved.
Apart from mailing them, of course, as I always do in such situations, I was quick to take on social media…
Beginning with Twitter – surprise, surprise – this is what I found:
Apart from this suspended official account, I found these other accounts associated with the company: @BravoflyBlog, @Bravofly_fr, @Bravofly_aus, and @Bravofly_no. None of them has shown any activity after 2016.
On Bravofly’s official website, there is no link to any official Twitter account. They have links to Facebook and Instagram pages, but both these seem utterly inactive.
Okay, we’re dealing with a ghost company here. Just go check out the thousands of bitter comments by ripped-off customers on their years-old social-media posts and under #bravofly Twitter hashtag; go check out the thousands of bottom-stars, fuming reviews on Trustpilot, Sitejabber, ProductReview, Facebook, HelloPeter, ReviewCentre, and TrustMamma amongst others; go check out this, this, this, this, and this threads on TripAdvisor… and then, just like I do now, wonder yourself… How can such an outright scam keep operating unhindered for all these years and ruthlessly stealing unsuspecting customers their hard-earned money? How can such an evidently fraudulent organization be included in the search results of sites like Skyscanner and Google? Why hasn’t any authority stepped in to ban them and imprison whoever runs the show from behind the scene? Is there no customer protection, no law in the 21st century?
For my part, there is absolutely no chance in this universe I give up and part with my money just like that; I am hotly determined to pursue my cause and achieve justification by any means possible. I will continue updating this post regularly with reporting my endeavors towards that end until I have received my money to the last penny.
As a next step, I located the parent company of Bravofly which is Lasminute.com Group. They maintain a pretty active Twitter account (as far as ads bombardment counts as activity). I decided to take my quest for my rightful refund on to them, and started off with the following tweet. I will see if they have anything to say.
I also found the CEO of the lastminute group, Fabio Cannavale, and thought about asking him in person:
Update September 2020: Not having heard anything at all from them for months, I decided to scale up the pressure a bit. I sent a personal letter to the company’s CEO via this form on his website. It read:
Hello there, We, together with numerous other people who have been writing to us frequently after finding this post (https://theblogofdimi.com/bravofly-review-refund-still-waiting-possibly-scam-beware/), as well as hundreds complaining on your companies’ social media pages, have been waiting for refunds of our embezzled money for months. Since your companies altogether lack customer service, would you please be able to let us personally know what’s going on? Is there any intention to refund customers at all? Or is the whole thing just a huge fraud? Absense of answer in this letter will be naturally perceived as confirming the latter. Thanks.
Letter to Bravofly and Lastminute’s CEO Fabio Cannavale
Quite uncoincidentally, minutes later, I received the following mail from Bravofly:
Hi Dimitrios,
Bravofly email
Booking ID: ************
Your Bangkok – Athens flight, departing 11 July 2020, has been cancelled for all the passengers in your original booking.
Kind regards,
Bravofly
Wow, really? Thanks for letting me know that the flight was canceled. If you hadn’t, I may have had shown up at the airport three months ago. Imagine that!
Further down in the letter, they prompted us to choose a reimbursement method between a voucher and the original payout method. The former was in a bright orange button (come on, voucher? Who would want to book with you again?). We selected the former, i.e. getting our bloody money back (minus a €30 precessing fee). A week later, we haven’t heard anything newer. If the cancelation notification took three months to arrive, imagine when the refund should be expected; perhaps never. We should start looking into legal avenues to achieve justification.
Update October 2020: At last, early October 2020, we received the following email from the address [email protected] in direct response to my letter to the company’s CEO.
Dear Mr. Pischinas,
Lastminute.com assistance team
Thank you for your email which has been passed to the VIP Service Desk for a response.
Please accept my sincere apologies for the late reply and for any inconvenience you have experienced in contacting us.
Given the current worldwide Coronavirus outbreak, we are currently receiving a very high number of contacts. Our teams are working hard to manage all requests however, this does mean that waiting times are longer than usual.
I have reviewed your booking and I am pleased to advise that we have now received the funds from our partner supplier and are now in a position to process your refund. You will shortly receive an email with instructions to complete your bank details through the ‘My Bookings’ area of the website and, once we have received these, we will arrange for this to refunded as soon as possible.
Once again, we thank you for your patience.
Kind regards,
VIP Service Desk
A week or so later, they followed up with this letter:
Hi Dimitrios,
Bravofly Email
Booking ID: **********
We are happy to inform you that your refund is now complete. Its total value is ***.** EUR (please note that this may differ from the original amount you were quoted, depending on how you chose to receive your refund). The full details of your refund and instructions on how to redeem it are included in this message:
We are sending you a cash refund of ***.** EUR. This will either be credited back to the original payment method you used to place your order with us, or sent to you via bank transfer. It may take up to 10 days to appear in your account, depending on your bank.
Kind regards,
Bravofly
Indeed, some days later, we finally received our refund. A £30 processing fee was deducted.
Conclusion: We only wanted to book a flight, and we ended up losing £30, after having wasted a substantial amount of time and energy over a period of more than three months. Judging by what people have testified on the comments of this post – having seen no result of their efforts after more than six months – we should still consider ourselves lucky for this outcome. For our part, when booking flights in the future, any company affiliated with the Last Minute Group will be a big NO-NO. Wish you luck everybody. And never stop persisting.
If you are still struggling in pursuit of your refund, it may also be a good idea to seek professional legal help via some flight-compensation service such as CompensAir.
