Dear Tripped Up,
On the evening of July 19, six members of my family were set to fly La Compagnie, a French business-class-only airline, from Newark Liberty International Airport to Nice, France, for a long-planned trip that included the Paris Olympics. When my husband and I arrived at the airport, the other four had already gone through security. The La Compagnie agent congratulated me on my (obvious) pregnancy and asked how far along I was. I answered truthfully: 28 weeks and a day. She said I needed a letter from my doctor saying I was OK to fly. But every doctor and midwife I had spoken to about the trip reassured me it was safe, including the midwife I saw the day before at my 28-week checkup. Even though she was attending someone else’s labor that evening, she managed to send a letter, first through a patient portal and then via email directly to La Compagnie, along with her provider identifier number and, when the staff insisted, a photo of her hospital ID. But even after I did everything they asked, the agent told me the crew had determined I could not board. The La Compagnie desk was closing for the night, and the agent gave me a number to call to rebook. But with no guarantee I would be able to fly, even if there were seats available in the coming days, we booked a flight for the next evening on Air France for about $6,560 each — a steep increase from our $3,530 La Compagnie tickets. La Compagnie offered to return the original $3,530 each, but I believe they were wrong to deny us boarding and should compensate us for the cost of the last-minute flight instead. Can you help? Emma, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Dear Emma,
Your frustrating and ultimately expensive evening in Newark raises a number of questions, but the thorniest is: How much responsibility did you have to verify the pregnancy policy of the airline before you traveled?
It turns out La Compagnie is one of a small group of global airlines — including Turkish, Ryanair, Qantas and Cathay Pacific — that require pregnant passengers to present a medical certificate clearing them to fly once they are past the 28-week mark.
La Compagnie’s written policy states this explicitly, as do those of its fellow outliers. But quite unlike them, the company’s policy is nowhere to be found online — or on any of the documentation you forwarded me.
I finally got my hands on it from Anne Crespo, a spokeswoman for the airline, who in September sent a screenshot from an internal document. The policy states that pregnant passengers between 28 and 35 weeks require a medical certificate confirming their stage of pregnancy and declaring them fit to fly. It specifically notes that a “medical certificate completed by a registered midwife cannot be accepted.”
Ms. Crespo said that the same information was in La Compagnie’s general conditions of carriage, but at least in the online version, it is not. She added that the carrier planned to add the information to a new section of the website by early October (it did not). When I followed up later, she told me the date had been pushed to mid-November. As of Nov. 20, it’s not there.
She said La Compagnie would not cover the more expensive Air France ticket. “We can’t pay for the difference since we offered to her to depart later with a proper medical certificate and she refused,” she wrote.
But the offer to refund your original ticket still held. “This is more than some other airline would have done in such conditions,” she wrote.
It is also more than La Compagnie pledges to do in the one substantive passage on its website where pregnancy is mentioned. Article 4 of its contract of carriage states that if a pregnant passenger is denied boarding because “the arrangements reasonably required for their carriage have not been made prior to check-in,” then no refund is required. It does not explain what those required arrangements are.
That’s my translation, anyway, because the English-language version of La Compagnie’s contract of carriage leaves three of its 22 articles, including Article 4, in French. (The same is true of the Italian version. Obviously, La Compagnie needs to work on its communications skills.)
Despite all these obstacles, some might argue that you should have called or emailed the airline beforehand to ask about its policy, or at least that your medical team should have encouraged you to do so.
A quick web search for advice on traveling while pregnant led me to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ opinion on the subject.
“Most commercial airlines allow pregnant women to fly up to 36 weeks of gestation,” it reads. “Some restrict pregnant women from international flights earlier in gestation and some require documentation of gestational age. For specific airline requirements, women should check with the individual carrier.”
Advice for pregnant travelers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is similar: “Some airlines will let you fly until 36 weeks, but others may have an earlier cutoff,” it writes, noting that pregnant travelers should check.
Meanwhile, U.S. carriers seem to have a much more laissez-faire policy toward pregnant travelers: American Airlines and United Airlines generally require medical clearance only after 36 weeks; Delta Air Lines, Spirit Airlines, Alaska Airlines and Southwest Airlines do not require it at all, and others fall in between.
I called La Compagnie’s customer service number to see what would happen. The courteous representative who answered put me on a brief hold, came back and explained the policy accurately, including the requirement that the letter could not be from a midwife.
I realize that calling them seems easy to do in hindsight, and does not take away from your frustration at what happened.
It sounds as if La Compagnie’s ground staff at Newark put in a good-faith effort to try to get you on the plane, but did make a vital error: not telling you explicitly about the “no midwives” rule. (Many airlines do accept letters from midwives.) If they had, you might have had a fighting chance to get a doctor’s letter before the gate closed.
I also totally get why, without this vital information, you did not trust La Compagnie enough to try to get on the next day’s flight, especially when a trip to the Olympics was on the line and your family members had gone ahead without you. You also noted that La Compagnie’s customer service phone lines closed less than an hour after you were denied boarding, so unless you had called right away, you would have had to wait for the next day just to find out if you’d be able to get on a flight that weekend (and that next day was a Saturday — so imagine the stressful scramble to get a letter from a doctor).
I’m sorry I was unable to get more for you — not even an apology. I’d take the refund while the offer is still there. “We won’t wait ages,” Ms. Crespo wrote to me, with surprising frankness.
La Compagnie’s planes might be luxurious, but to me, its customer relations skills seem to be coach class at best.
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