Reimbursement of ticket costs
from Jürgen Vogl
As the train was already pulling in, she was only able to complain about the error at a ticket counter at the destination station and fill out a refund application. The application for reimbursement was rejected by the railroad company on the grounds that the complaint had been made too late. Ms. A. therefore turned to apf, which was able to find a solution despite the late complaint and obtained the full ticket costs in the form of vouchers.
As the individual railroad companies handle the reimbursement of ticket costs differently, this time you will find out how best to proceed if you want to get a ticket refunded by ÖBB-Personenverkehr :
- If you have purchased the wrong ticket or the wrong number of tickets at the ticket machine, you should visit a ticket counter as soon as possible and report the error.
- If this is not possible, you should send a completed and signed refund application form , including tickets, by post to the address on the form or hand it in at the ticket counter as soon as possible. For one-way tickets before the day of validity and for season tickets, refunds are also possible during the period of validity.
How does the apf go about finding a solution?
Mediation takes place by apf contacting the company after we have received your complaint. The railroad company will be briefly informed of the situation, the legal and collective bargaining claims and informed that an arbitration procedure will be opened for clarification. The contact persons in the individual companies are based in different departments. At some companies, the customer service department is responsible for processing the complaint, while others have their own complaints department that works with us. Once we have made contact with the rail company concerned, it generally has one to two weeks to send feedback to apf. If both parties accept the proposed solution, they agree to a so-called effective out-of-court settlement. As we have built up a very good working relationship over the nine years that we have been mediating between passengers and rail companies in rail transport, we, as apf, are able to reach a quick solution in most cases.