123Milhas cancelled its Promo trips and offered only vouchers, not refunds

On August 18, 2023, 123Milhas — a 16-year-old Brazilian travel site claiming 15 million tickets issued — cancelled the remaining 2023 departures of its discount 'Promo' packages, telling September-to-December buyers their only compensation would be vouchers for other 123Milhas products. In a confidential response to consumer agency Senacon obtained by Valor, it said cash refunds were unviable: payment 'will not be viable, without compromising the rest of the operation, and therefore the vast majority of the company's clients.' About 53,000 customers had accepted vouchers by August 22.

The company's own account of the failure: Promo was designed on three premises — airfare and hotel price swings, expected consumer behaviour, and lower advertising costs — and 'lamentably, it did not find the projected variables', with airfares hitting their biggest rise in years. 'Errors of assessment, combined with market adversity, impact solid and promising companies,' the filing said. Senacon had sent eight questions and was deciding whether to open an administrative process that could bring a fine and a ban on selling its services.

Legal pressure closed in from all sides: a Paraíba court injunction ordered the company to issue tickets or refund customers; the Public Defender's Office in Minas Gerais ran relief task forces for stranded customers; and the founders petitioned the Supreme Federal Court against a decision breaking their banking secrecy. The company argued its record — 923 complaints in 2022 and 586 through May 2023, against millions of transactions — showed the collapse was a sudden product failure, not a pattern.

Senacon weighing an administrative fine and a sales ban, courts issuing refund injunctions, and tens of thousands of customers pushed into vouchers.

Promo sold future travel at prices that only worked if fares stayed cheap; when fares hit multi-year highs the model had no slack left.

Defaulting compensation to vouchers shifted the company's cash crisis onto customers who had paid for specific dates.

The company conceded 'errors of assessment' in writing — the pricing model, not the market, was the admission at the centre of the collapse.

A discount product priced on best-case assumptions borrows from its own future — and paying the debt in store credit turns a pricing error into a trust error.

Senacon kept the response under analysis for a possible administrative process; courts kept issuing injunctions; customers who had taken vouchers held credit instead of trips, while the company said cancellation and refund rules for all its other products remained in force.