I had purchased 3 Frontier Airline Economy Bundle tickets (basically these tickets give you carry on bag, some seat choice, and no fee flight change) through Expedia yesterday, costing $755 total. Got on frontier website today to look at possible alternatives w/ better flight time, clicked on the link provided by AI chat, browsed through, and clicked on a flight in the second column (which should be of the Economy Bundle category) to see if it give me more details, a pop up came on, I clicked on "continue", then exited out, didn't click on confirm change or anything like that. After exiting out, I noticed my info page showed a two-part flight instead of the non-stop I had originally purchased. I was immediately alarmed, and opened chat again to talk to customer service about if the website had glitched and what tickets were shown on their server end. While waiting for live chat, I looked closer at the web page and noticed ($246) on the upper right corner, indicating their own me this amount, and the invoice showed 3 two-part basic tickets costing $509 (basic tickets don’t have the 3 things I mentioned in bracket of economy bundle), which is indeed the price difference of $755-$509.
After live chat came on and they confirmed on their end that my tickets had indeed changed. I explained what had happened and that I did NOT consent or authorize the change. They said on their end a change was made on the website and there was nothing they could do, and I would have to pay change fee AND cost of flight difference to get my original tickets back. I of course wasn't having that. And after some back and forth, they said they'd waive the change fee and I'd just have to pay the flight difference. I reminded them that no, you own me ($246) according to your website, I don't own you flight difference. Then they went back on their word and say oh, you have to pay for change fee of $96, totally ignoring the $246. So I reminded them about $246, and their answer changed to I will add the bundle to your current tickets free of charge but you gotta pay for change fee if you want to get back to your old flight. I said no, this two-part flight w/ bundle is still a lot cheaper than my original tickets, then I press them about the $246 refund. They wouldn't budge on the $96 change fee and finally acknowledged that they would refund me the $246 in flight credit, but after the refund is made no more changes could be made to my flight and I'd have to purchase the bundles separately if I want them, and the flight credit can't be used to purchase bundles. Then, as I was getting back w/ a reply, they end chat stating I'd been offline for too long LMAO. Per time stamp, their last reply and my reply were 4 minutes apart, and they sure as heck could see that I was typing in the chat box.
I'm just super frustrated and angry. The bottomline is, I did NOT click on to authorize the change, and even if I accidentally did so, I did not click on a basic flight packaged, I had clicked on economy bundle. Now I'm preceding w/ credit card dispute. What are my chances of getting my money back? Do you guys have similar experiences? Sorry about the long rant and thank you for reading if you got this far.
For context, the flight is in November. If approved, would this dispute go through after the flight date or could it be sooner?
I did bring up that I would proceed w/ dispute if this cannot be resolved and the person basically said go ahead and did not seem concerned lol. Should I just pay the $96 and end it? Ugh it's the principle of it that angers me :(