Dear Tripped Up,
Last January, I flew Air France to Tunisia via Paris to compete for the United States in a Grand Prix global fencing tournament that could help qualify me for the men’s saber event in the 2028 Summer Olympics. On the way, Air France lost my fencing bag, containing everything from blades to a Team USA tracksuit — a total value of $2,736. I competed with borrowed equipment, but did far worse than expected, in part from the stress of the loss and in part from not having my gear. The bag never materialized, and in the following months, trying to get a reimbursement, I complied with every request from the airline’s customer service representatives, but ended up stuck in an endless loop of contradictory, and frankly bizarre, responses from countless agents. For example, after five and a half months of sending and resending everything they requested, I received a message rejecting my claim and offering a $619 “gesture of good will” since I had not submitted “all the necessary documents.” When I called to ask what was missing, a representative said I had to submit receipts for the lost items, something no one had bothered to mention before. Done. But two weeks later, they told me my receipts included “inconsistencies that raised concerns about the information provided” and asked for bank statements that matched the receipts. That was enough. I refused and wrote a letter of complaint to Air France executives, to no avail. Can you help? Lev, Bethesda, Md.
Dear Lev,
If you parry and riposte anywhere near as well as you put together a PDF, you’re a lock for Olympic gold in 2028. The 121-page document you emailed me was a mesmerizing account of the excruciating red tape Air France put you through in what should have been an open-and-shut lost-luggage case.
Especially riveting was the sequence of events in which the Air France representatives would not accept an image of your passport in JPG format, instead insisting you resend it as a PDF. You did, but they wrote back to ask you to resubmit it with your signature visible — now a JPG was fine, as long the file was under two megabytes.
You sent that file by email, only to receive a message three days later saying that Air France had not received it, at which point you re-sent it, only to receive the same message, this time four days later. You sent it again, but a representative said your signature did not match your signature on a document they had requested earlier, and asked you to re-sign and resubmit the document. (Mysteriously, the file could now be up to nine megabytes.) You did so, but Air France wrote back to say it could not open the document.