Tripped Up: I Gave Up My Seat for $800, but Frontier Forgot to Pay Me.

Dear Tripped Up,In March 2024, I was awaiting my $96 Frontier Airlines flight from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Trenton, N.J., when gate agents announced they were seeking 20 volunteers to fly the next day instead, in order to lighten the aircraft’s load.The offer: an $800 credit for a future flight.

(Or was it multiple future flights? This was the subject of debate among passengers.) I stepped forward, and was asked to write my email address on a piece of paper, which was passed around for the other volunteers to do the same.The gate agent was patient and polite, but didn’t provide me with any receipt.

When I returned the next day for my makeup flight, he was there again, so I asked why I hadn’t received an email with the credit, as other passengers had.He didn’t know.

Later, I reached out to Frontier, but the carrier made it very hard to reach a human by phone and sent me emails that didn’t really make sense.I did get a $384 payment — not a voucher — a few days after the flight, but since Frontier still owed me about $300 from a cancellation the year prior, I thought it was for that.

Can you help? Linda, Princeton, N.J.Dear Linda,Let me get this straight: Frontier’s method for keeping track of volunteers due $800 vouchers was to have them scrawl their email addresses on one piece of paper?That’s a rhetorical question, because you emailed me the photo you snapped of said sheet, which showed a list of 10 email addresses in a wide variety of handwriting.That’s where I started when I dug into your problem, writing to the other nine email addresses to ask if they had gotten their credits — in some cases for the multiple travelers in their party.Eight wrote back to tell their stories.

All (except you) had received vouchers, although three complained, unprompted, about the scribble-down-your-email-address system, and several grumbled that the vouchers turned out to be for one-time use.One, Dino of Fort Washington, Pa., managed to persuade Frontie...