The story is no longer really about an airline refund.
In November 2025, Iberia agreed to compensate me after downgrading me on a flight from New York to Madrid. Simple enough right?.
They investigated the complaint, accepted responsibility, and agreed to pay me some not insignificant €Euros as a refund. That should have been the end of the story. But it wasn’t. Nine months later, I was still trying to receive the refund.
The Cheque That Could Never Be Cashed
The first problem was Iberia’s preferred payment method. They sent a cheque.
The issue? New Zealand banks stopped accepting and processing cheques years ago (2020). I explained this repeatedly and provided my bank account details instead. The response was baffling. Iberia insisted they could not transfer funds directly to a New Zealand bank account and advised that cheques were their only payment option in New Zealand.
In other words:
“Here’s your refund.”
“Thanks, but I literally cannot use it.”
“Sorry, that’s our process.”
What followed felt less like customer service and more like being trapped in a workflow engine.
Over several months I:
- Supplied bank account details multiple times.
- Supplied identity documents.
- Supplied proof of account.
- Supplied SWIFT codes.
- Supplied a Wise account.
- Supplied additional address information.
- Replied to requests for information I had already provided.
Each time I thought we had reached the end of the process, another email arrived asking for something new or asking for the same information again.
Several responses appeared disconnected from previous correspondence, as though the case was being handled without the history being reviewed. Even my travel agent commented that it seemed like nobody was actually reading the earlier emails. And just for a laugh, every email ends with “Once again, we truly apologize for the delay and any inconvenience this may have caused. We hope you will include Iberia in your future travel plans and give us the opportunity to restore your confidence in our dedication to customer service.” HAHAHAHAHAHA.
Now if I put my analyst/consultant hat on and try and put my rage in my pocket for a bit, this whole shit show gets even more interesting to me.
Somewhere within Iberia’s payment systems is an assumption that New Zealand customers can receive compensation by cheque.
That assumption was once reasonable. It is no longer true. The process continues because the system believes the world still works that way.
Nobody appears empowered to step outside the workflow and ask a simple question: “If our customer cannot cash the cheque, how do we solve the problem?” Instead, the process optimises for compliance with the workflow rather than resolution of the customer’s issue.
I spend much of my professional life helping organisations improve digital services and customer experience. This whole mess highlights a common problem. Organisations often focus on digitising existing processes rather than redesigning them. The result is a modern-looking process that still contains outdated assumptions.
Customers don’t care whether a workflow has been followed correctly. Customers care whether the outcome has been achieved. Iberia successfully processed hundreds of emails. What it struggled to do was transfer money from one bank account to another. Which happens every fucking day, all around the world. And do you want to know the absolute kicker …
The Final Irony
One of the striking parts of this story is that my travelling companion appears to have navigated the same process successfully using a Wise account after months of back-and-forth communication. She’s got her refund – to her Wise account – using the process I told her to use after they had emailed me saying ….
Iberia accepted responsibility and agreed to make the payment within weeks of my complaint. Receiving the money has taken far longer than resolving the original issue. I just want what was promised to me,
