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 Kaç, 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 küresel airlines — including Turkish, Ryanair, Qantas and Cathay Pacific — that require pregnant passengers to present a medical certificate clearing them to fly evvel 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.
