Nature Air has been facing problems since December 31st, 2017, the day of the tragic plane crash in which 12 people died, 10 American tourists and the two Costa Rican pilots. A few days later their operations were suspended by Civil Aviation and although they received green light to resume operations three weeks later, the company reported important financial loses and was forced to fire several employees.

Now, the domestic airline is once again in the eye of the hurricane as clients are now complaining they have not been reimbursed for tickets purchased months back.

When the airline’s operations were suspended in the beginning of January they already had many scheduled flights which had to be cancelled, back then, the company stated they would reimburse clients for their tickets, yet it seems this has not been the case.

The company has only made reference to the situation through a post in Facebook last week

“The situation in which we currently are for external motives, has caused the cancellation of flights that were already scheduled, and has also required that we do a restructure of our operation which affects our reimbursement policy since we cannot complete them with the celerity our clients expect us to; we are looking for additional alternatives such as the offering of tickets or credit that can be used in the future. As soon as this situation takes a different direction we will communicate with those affected by this problem”.

The many comments to this one post in Facebook show the dissatisfaction of national and foreign tourists:

“I still have not been reimbursed for flights we paid for but you cancelled. We have been waiting 3 weeks”, commented Racquel Foran

“We have been waiting 8 weeks and still nothing even after being advised we would receive a refund (twice!!)”, says Sara Dixey.

“You canceled our flight inbound a day before we arrived- we were about to board one of 4 flights to get to Costa Rica from Europe and were left with no way of finding other transport in such short notice! We expect a full refund of the round trip at this point as we do not want to risk counting on flying with you back to San José on the 17! You emailed us asking for our info in order to process a refund. I expect to receive the refund ASAP – we have been put out of money by having to spend on other flights and forms of transportation without a refund so far! NOT cool!”, expressed Constanza Maute.

Some of the complaints of the clients included the fact that the airline is still taking reservations but apparently cancelling the flights shortly after.

When the suspension was lifted, Nelson Vega, General Manager of Nature Air had assured in an interview with daily La Nacion that the suspension had resulted in losses of over $1.2 million.

Nature Air recently fired 31 employees and stated that the suspension of the operations had also caused difficulties for the company to get approval of loans

“This has resulted on a very heavy load in all aspects, two months ago we expressed our concern that if things weren’t handled immediately it will lead to this critical reality. The truth of the matter is that the unusual time it took the authorities to lift the suspension of our license, due to an administrative and not a security matter, worsen the situation”,

explained Alex E. Khajavi, CEO of Nature Air.