Advice re: JCB credit card payment issue on overseas site

[northSaver]

Thanks for the update Hedgehog. Glad you got it sorted in the end. I'm flying Turkish Airlines to Manchester next month, I booked it on their website and paid with a Japanese Mastercard a few months ago. It went through OK, but since then I've been unable to confirm a minor flight change online, neither on their website nor mobile app. It kept saying there was an error when I hit the "Confirm change" button, and to try again later. But today I've noticed it says a different message: "Dear passenger, Due to the rules, we cannot perform the transaction you want to make for this reservation online."

Pretty strange, since I booked it directly with them and not through an agent? So yes, their website and app are lacking in quality somewhat.

As an aside, if I don't confirm the changes (a couple of flights have been rescheduled by 5 to 20 minutes) then what will happen? Presumably I'll still be able to fly? Or does that depend on the airline? I don't really want to go through the hassle of phoning them just for these minor changes, but if there's a danger they'll cancel my booking (they haven't said they will yet), then I will. Is it OK to ignore it?

I'm glad to hear their planes and service were OK, it's the first time I'm flying with them. They were by far the cheapest at the time, and direct to Manchester from Istanbul (missing out LHR) was a huge bonus.

[RetireJapan]

As an aside, if I don't confirm the changes (a couple of flights have been rescheduled by 5 to 20 minutes) then what will happen? Presumably I'll still be able to fly? Or does that depend on the airline? I don't really want to go through the hassle of phoning them just for these minor changes, but if there's a danger they'll cancel my booking (they haven't said they will yet), then I will. Is it OK to ignore it?

I haven't flown Turkish before, but in my experience it is worth the hassle to confirm flights etc. You don't want to show up at the airport and find you don't have a seat or something

[Gareth]

A few years ago, I tried to book train tickets on the Russian railways website for the Trans-Siberian. It wasn’t working at all well in Safari but as soon as I changed to Chrome, it worked perfectly.

Have you tried another browser just in case that’s the issue?

[northSaver]

Thanks Ben and Gareth. I tried it on Chrome just in case - same message. So I'll phone them to confirm nearer the time, in case there are any more minor changes between now and then.

I've noticed that their android app is now behaving different to before. In the Manage Booking page it says:
"The date/time of your flight has changed. If you prefer not to travel on the new flight, you can change or cancel your flight."

There are now only two buttons: Cancel and Change. The Confirm button has disappeared! I suspect that this is a bug because I can't scroll down to see the new flight details and Confirm button, like I could before. However, the wording of the message implies that I don't have to do anything unless I want to cancel or change.

A Google search suggests that most airlines don't cancel your booking if you fail to confirm schedule changes, but some do (Air France is one of them). So it's probably best to confirm by phone, as Ben suggested.

[Hedgehog]

Turkish Airlines (TK) have a Tokyo office with an 03- number. If you call you get messages in Turkish, Japanese and English. If you select English you are automatically connected to the main TK call centre in Turkey; choose Japanese and one of the airline's Tokyo-based Japanese staff will field your query. Throughout my saga, and many calls to the call centre, I never found their call centre staff (Turkish and Japanese alike) to be anything other than courteous, even if none of them was able to resolve my particular payment snafu. It strikes me that your issue should be much more straight-forward to resolve. Hope you get it sorted!

[SLW]

I’ve flown Turkish dozens of times since they were one of the only options in a previous country I lived in. As you say the service is generally fine and the planes are reasonably new, staff are friendly. Also the lounges in Istanbul are very nice. But the IT systems are a complete disaster. Online management of reservations is nearly impossible. They lost my luggage for 4 days (!), missing reservation details, online check-in would never work. They somehow lost a pet reservation on the day of flight - the pet was included on the original reservation printout which we had in hand, but then at the airport, no record. They worked it out by about 30 min before takeoff, but dealing with them was so stressful. After a few tries, I gave up using online reservations and resorted to dealing with them via the Turkish Airline office with paper printouts and receipts. It’s a pity as they are a decent route to Europe from Japan.

[Hedgehog]

Okay, so I was overly hasty/optimistic when I wrote a few days ago that this was solved. The refund appeared in my JCB statement at the beginning of November, and I was supposed to have had the money transferred to my regular bank account, the one from which I always pay JCB and have been using for many years, on Friday last week. It didn't appear then, and still hadn't appeared this morning. I spoke to JCB, and the friendly call centre operative insisted the money had been paid and that I needed to take this up with my bank. I went down to the local branch of my bank, SMBC, and was told clearly that no money had arrived, and that I needed some form of proof from JCB that the transfer had been made. So...back on the phone to JCB, put through to the same call centre operative, who then told me that further investigation had shown that the transfer had not actually gone through, and had been rejected by my bank due to some kind of error with my name. At this point, the penny dropped; when I had opened a second account with SMBC five years ago, I had had to give my full name, including my middle names, which had not been the case when I had first opened an account with them nearly 30 years ago. This had meant issuing a new bank card, new bank book, changing the name on the existing account etc... but I did not think to change anything with either of my credit card issuers. As my bank account name (full name including middle names) does not match the name (given name/surname) that JCB has, this is presumably where the problem lies. I now have to change my name with JCB to match the one on the bank account...

[Hedgehog]

In the end, this was all sorted out in December when the outstanding balance was simply deducted from my November credit card bill, which is what I would have settled for in the first place. There were no communications from JCB as to why they decided to change how they refunded me the outstanding balance. I was just pleased the whole sorry saga was over.

[RetireJapan]

Ooof, that is pretty rough. Glad they finally got it resolved at least.