In the near future I’m supposed to fly Tunisair, and I just got downgraded from business class to economy. Now, operational issues do arise, though I can’t help but find both the execution and the actual downgrade to be a bit puzzling.

As I recently covered , I’ll be taking a rather roundabout routing from the United States to France, as I’m flying Air Algerie from Canada to Tunisia via Algeria, and then I’ll be connecting on Tunisair to France.

My flight between Tunis (TUN) and Marseille (MRS) was booked separately from the Air Algerie ticket, and I paid for business class, which was rather reasonably priced. The flight is supposed to be operated by an Airbus A320.

Well, ahead of my flight, I just received a notification that I’ve been downgraded. The email is only in French and not English, and based on a translation, it says “we are writing to inform you that your flight reservation has undergone changes.” It then shows the same flight I initially had booked, but in economy, rather than business class.

What cracks me up here is that the airline acts as if this is just totally cool. There’s no mention of how to request downgrade compensation, or anything. For that matter, there’s not even an explicit note about “hey, you’ve been downgraded.” Instead, it just shows a new fare class.

I can’t wait to see what an adventure that compensation request becomes — I’m sure they’ll be very prompt and generous with my refund. 😉

Not to sound like a certain drama king and self-proclaimed multi-award winning whatever whatever whatever who always gets “scammed,” but… I don’t actually understand what’s going on here?

For what it’s worth, I booked my flight just days ago, and the flight was wide open — there were almost no seats occupied in business class, and economy at least showed the maximum inventory in all fare classes (which isn’t to say the flight is empty, but it definitely wasn’t booked out).