Discovery profiting from travel restrictions

We booked flights to London on 24/11/2021 via Discovery and were advised on 29/11/2021 by Emirates that our flights were cancelled. Discovery charged a hefty R420 non refundable booking fee per ticket, despite us doing the booking online.

I appealed to them "While I appreciate that the Booking fee is non-refundable if I cancel the booking, I do believe it should be refundable if the airline is compelled to cancel the ticket. I therefore request that a full refund be made to my Discovery card. Surely Discovery does not wish to profit from its clients’ bad fortune?"

They rejected my appeal.

I tried again and wrote "I again want to appeal to Discovery to revisit the non-refundable nature of the Discovery booking fee under these extraordinary circumstances. Why should everybody lose out except Discovery? What is more, Discovery is probably going to pick up a further booking fee when we rebook as soon as flights resume. So Discovery will probably profit out of the pockets of their clients as a result of the draconian measures introduced by foreign governments. "

After several telephone conversations I received their final response: "We received feedback from the ex-gratia panel advising that the exception to have your booking fee refunded has been declined. While this booking fee is unfortunately non-refundable as it is used to fund the original transaction administration and processing, we are covering all additional servicing and administration costs for processing your international flight refunds and re-bookings affected by the COVID-19 pandemic."

It is quite distasteful that Discovery uses such negative circumstances to bolster their already excessive profits out of the pockets of their loyal customers.