Staff! Our trip to Orlando was ruined and we want our money back.

Dear Tripped Up,

Last June, my wife and I, along with two of our children, flew from our home in India to the eastern United States to see family and visit Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. The trip included three domestic flights over five days on Frontier Airlines: Philadelphia to Orlando, Orlando to Atlanta and Atlanta back to Philadelphia. The total cost for four people on three flights was an affordable $939.75, including a $99.99 “Discount Den” membership on Frontier. (We also spent $1,269.52 on tickets at Universal.) But our first flight was delayed and ultimately canceled, and the Frontier staff told us the next available flight would be three or four days later—too close to our return flight to India. At the Philadelphia airport we were given a QR code to request a refund, which we did for all three flights. But all we got was an email with $339.92 worth of credit, good for three months, plus four additional messages with a $100 voucher for each of us. Since Frontier does not operate in India, the credit and vouchers are useless. I fought Frontier via my Discover card, but lost. (Meanwhile, Universal has refunded us in full.) Can you help? Hari, Bangalore, India

Dear Hari,

The federal rule on flight cancellations in the United States couldn’t be clearer. According to on the Transportation Department website: “A consumer is entitled to a refund if the airline has canceled a flight, regardless of the reason, and the consumer chooses not to travel.” Rapidly expiring travel credits are not an option.

Frontier’s first email to you, on the other hand, couldn’t have been darker. You read the email and interpreted it as partial, useless credit. You forwarded it to me and I came to the same conclusion.

Yet it appears that the email was intended to inform you that a refund would be issued. I learned this after consulting with Jennifer de la Cruz, a spokeswoman for Frontier.

The email contained a chronological list of transactions related to your reservation, sent without introduction or explanation. First, there’s a “Payment: Discover” for $439.91, dated May 18, the day you reserved the outbound flight and joined the Discount Den. Next comes the confusing “Travel Credit” -$339.92 on June 29, three days after your canceled flight. This transaction will include brief instructions on how to redeem the credit, along with other terms and conditions.

Then come three more confusing transactions: the first, dated July 2 – the day after you received the email – was a “Payment: Credit File,” whatever that means, for $339.92; the second, labeled “Refund: Discover” for -$339.92, also on July 2, with the word “pending” in small, light blue letters; and finally, there is a “Purchase Total” of $99.99.

“I can certainly appreciate that they are confused because the original credit appears first in the chronology of the email,” Ms. de la Cruz wrote to me.

Although she initially told me that this list was automatically generated by your refund request, which made me fear that thousands of Frontier customers were similarly baffled by other cancellations, she later told me that this was human error.

“Normally, a customer will not receive an email detailing the process the agent followed to initiate the refund,” Ms. de la Cruz wrote. Apparently, by using the QR code given to you at the airport, you initiated a manual review process that was then failed. If you had instead requested a refund through the email Frontier sent you around the time your flight was canceled, the process would have been simpler, she said. Apparently you couldn’t have known this.

When we later reviewed your Discover statement together, it turned out that you were indeed reimbursed $339.92 for that first flight.

But about the remaining $500 or so for the other two flights, for which you submitted separate refund requests? And should that $99.99 membership be refunded too?

This is where things get more complicated. Because you booked each of the three one-way flights separately, rather than as one itinerary with one reservation code, the federal rule on cancellations technically only applies to the first one-way flight. This is why I urge people to use the ‘multicity’ feature on airline booking sites.

Unfortunately, like a handful of other US airlines, there is no such option on the Frontier site. When I tried to make a multicity reservation through Frontier’s online chat feature, customer service told me I had to make separate one-way reservations just like you did. (You can make such a multi-city reservation through an online travel agent, or OTA, but this involves a third party involved in your booking, adding an extra layer of customer service.)

So that left you out about $600 initially. Six days later, on July 7, Frontier refunded you $327.92 for the Atlanta-Philadelphia leg — presumably because whoever handled the “manual” process realized your flights were tied together. I understand why you didn’t immediately notice these refunds on your statement, as the disputes you filed with Discover resulted in a series of back-and-forth charges that were ultimately very unclear.

Ms. de la Cruz said it was a mistake not to refund your $171.92 for the outstanding flight. “This is our fault and we sincerely apologize for the misunderstanding,” she wrote.

You have now refunded the $171.92, but Frontier has refused to refund your $99.99 membership because it is good for the entire year. That’s understandable, but frustrating for someone living abroad.

There’s still one pressing question here: Why couldn’t Frontier get you on another flight for “three or four days”? My initial reaction was that Frontier should not offer frequent flights between Philadelphia and Orlando, and I wanted to warn readers that booking tightly scheduled trips on infrequently flown routes could be a recipe for disaster. But no, Frontier typically operates seven flights a day between the two cities.

Instead it turned out that your flight was on June 26th day that thousands of flights in the United States were canceled due to severe storms. (I wrote about another canceled flight that day, which left a troop of Boy Scouts stranded in New York City, in a separate column.)

That means you’ve largely fallen victim to extreme bad luck, compounded by a number of other factors: first, your risky strategy of booking three flights so close together on a once-in-a-lifetime trip; and second, poor customer service, which can be part of the trade-off you pay for when you book with a budget airline.