As we know budget airline cut corners to reduce costs, and that usually works and I am pretty happy about it.

However, it does hurt when the corner it cuts is on you.

So my story is that I booked a ticket from Barcelona BCN to Paris ORY on 9 September 2018.

Everything seems to be working fine until I reached the ORY airport, where I couldn’t find my luggage.

I approached the staff at ORY airport with my luggage tag and was told that my luggage doesn’t even make it on the aeroplane! So they tagged my bags and checked it into the system, but the aircrew on the ground forgot to put my bags on the aircraft!

I couldn’t believe that but accepted it in the end, as bad things do happen from time to time, and the website says it usually delivers the missing luggage pretty fast (within 72 hours).

Besides, the airline offers expenses claiming to acquire basic items that I was carrying in the checked bag.

So with mixed feelings, I waited. And it was until Sep 11 3 PM that I finally get it back from a random delivery guy who handed the suitcase to me without any receipt.

Next, it comes to the claiming part. After a couple of emails and a week later I received an email asking me to fill my bank account information into an online form for transferring about €100 to me.

And, here is where the cut gets deeper.

I live in Singapore, so I try filling up the form with my SGD based account, but it just doesn’t work at all. I promised you that I tried filling up the online form more than 50 times but it just doesn’t work for me, and it keeps prompting me the error message fail in saving the data.

I tried emailed the airline three times.

On the first time, they sent me the link to the online form again, which doesn’t work at all like the previous one.

On the second time, the staff assures me that the transfer is under processing. I was pretty angry to receive the second one, as it shows that the customer support team didn’t even know what’s going on and just simply replied with a standard template.

On the third time, they stop replying.

It is 2018 Oct 23 as the time of writing, and I think I have given up on the airline and decided to write down my experience and forget about the €100.

And this is not the full story yet.

As I bought a travel insurance policy from Singapore, I was trying to claim it for the baggage delay.

However, the insurance policy requires me to get written proof containing details of my baggage delay (including the duration) from the Public Transport provider.

That sounds like a fine print to me and should be simple for an airline to provide. But it turns out to be to extremely difficult for Vueling Airline to give me such a written proof, as they cut corners, and didn’t track when exactly the bag is delivered, where a simple delivery receipt could solve the issue.

As a result, the airline ignores all my emails chasing for the written proof.

And based on the insurance policy, I think I probably will lose about US$500 for the claim.

Besides all these issues, I couldn’t even make a free phone call to them to consult about it, as they don’t provide a free international support hotline.

So I guess this is just Vueling Airline being a budget airline.

And as a traveller not based in Spain, I would try avoiding Vueling airline as much as possible just in case something similar will happen again.

As a conclusion, I hope you find my experience helpful when deciding which airline to take.

Safe travel and godspeed.