Sent Swiss an email today, they were surprisingly quick at replying. A bit disappointing though. The message is here:

"SWISS is currently unable to process any refunds, via any channels, due to the Corona Virus issue. Our main priority is to assist passengers with cancelled flights and rebook then to alternative flight options.

Once SWISS is able to reprioritise her duties back to normal, the refund will be p[processed, later in the year.

Wishing you a most pleasant afternoon and look forward to welcoming you on board in the near future"

So my flight to NL this weekend was cancelled by Swiss, they re-booked me an outbound flight tomorrow morning, but no return flight yet. So I called to change the flight to mid June - hopefully I'll be able to make that one and they won't cancel it.

I called that number again. Two minutes to get through the "press 2 for flight changes, 3 for English etc" and I was then answered after a few seconds. Five minutes to change my flight, maybe I'm just really lucky!

Very sorry for you. They had simply cancelled all my flights in May in one go.......

Has anyone got a refund yet?

Nope. Not even for the first one where I could still claim that online. Anything else is open, Swiss owes me a fair amount of money by now

IATA is pressuring the EU to allow companies to give vouchers versus refunds and this also retroactively. Speculation is that Swiss is holding off any reimbursement to then rely on not having to pay.

Des pressions pour ne pas rembourser les vols annulés
https://beta.20min.ch/fr/story/des-p...s-214522317867

Yea sure, and those vouchers will not be valid for a long time. Afaik there is a right to a reimbursement, I´ll definitely go for that. Rebooking right now doesn´t make too much sense, who knows when things will be back to relatively normal?

But does the EU law that states a refund must given to flights cancelled by the airline within a certain time frame apply to Switzerland?

EU Regulation 261/2004 provides that one option available is a full refund within 7 days. This Regulation has been incorporated into Swiss law as part of the bilateral accords.

To my knowledge the Swiss legislature, nor the transport authorities have waived these provisions.

Please note that ‘interpretations’ of the Regulation by the European Court of Justice have yet to be included into Swiss law.

Totally agreed. Most Airlines in Europe were bailed out with taxpayer money at least once, we should not bail them out again!

Plus if airlines goes bust those vouchers will serve nothing.

Swiss cancelled our flights for Thursday of this week a few weeks ago. I waited until yesterday to phone for a refund and got one without any hassle at all.

Now what to do with the London hotel that's refusing to refund our booking.

until you got the money on your account I would not be too sure abou tthe "no hassle" part

For the second - if its a big chain then shame them on Social media?

So you have an actual refund in your account? Or told you would get one? I was told in March I would get one but only when the refunds team where back at work after the pandemic which could be towards the end of the year.

This post isnt't just Swiss related - I have nearly 10 tickets that got cancelled due to COVID with various airlines.

The ones I booked with a UK credit card, I've gotten a chargeback from my bank in the UK.

Those booked with my Swiss cards, I haven't done chargebacks yet.... but I'm going to try to do that today.

Has anyone done this here?

There is a daily flight to Amsterdam from Geneva with KLM just in case

No and I don't expect it to hit my account for a couple of months. I used to cancel dozens of flight tickets per week as part of my job role, and the process has never been instantaneous, so I wouldn't expect the money back immediately anyway.
No because chargebacks are your next course of action when you can't get a refund through the usual channels. I had considered doing a chargeback for our hotel booking, but they finally agreed to amend it to the new wedding date of late May 2021.

Thanks for your advice. I decided to get a refund and it is being processed. Expedia gave excellent customer service...said the refund may take up to 8 weeks, which is fine as long as it is coming sometime.

After seeing what is going on in the US, not sure I will be using those vouchers anytime soon. Spending the extra cash on sprucing up the balcony.

Has anyone else received dodgy emails related to their cancelled trips with SWISS?

We know our flights for this month were cancelled and they have disappeared from the booking page and we've been dealing directly with SWISS. Today we received an email from a company claiming we have been rebooked for October. It has our real names and one of our original flights although not the whole itinerary. I won't list the company name here so as not to give them free publicity.

Weird, and no. Had about 6 flights cancelled fully, but no dodgy emails

Have a few tickets for the family, for one of them we started the refund process far before the grounding, the rest later. Had to call them (~1 month back), because the refund form is not available online anymore. We were told, they started the process to refund all of them, but no results so far.

I tried to ping them this week via the online contact form which doesn't work at all. Every time I get an "access denied". So I contacted them on Facebook, got the following answer:
"please note that all refunds has been put on hold for now and will be process at a later date but be rest assured that once the relevant department start processing refunds then you can get your refunds deposited back to the credit that was used as a form of payment for your reservation."

Not a particularly nice thing to do after cashing all the government money
I think I'm gonna go ahead and get a chargeback to my credit card.