I flew BDL-SAV this week connecting in CLT both ways.

I called three days before first leg and secured FC all the way to SAV. I arrive at the check in counter and the agent ask for my cert. I hand her one and she says she needs two. I ask what the mileage is and she says 824. Nothing I can do so I give her 2 800 mile certs.

That same day I called to secure FC for retunr flight. I arrive to airport for retunr flight the agent asks for my certs and I hand him two, he says no I only need one cert. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth I say nothing and sit FC all the way home on one cert.

Any idea what happened here? Did I just get a nice guy on the way back? Should he have taken two certs or should my first flight had only been one cert?

rawbert

Usually there is some grace mileage in either 500 or 800 mile certs. I don't recall right now on US what that grace mileage level is. However, when I fly anything between 800 and 1,000 miles I usually just hand over one cert, etc. If you check in at the gate they are often very busy, and will just staple your cert to the boarding pass. FYI the grace officially is probably like 50 miles, etc, something like that. It is like anything else in the airline business, sometimes you get lucky and sometimes not. If it happens again, just tell the person you think there is or should be a small grace amount of miles. Also fyi US is one of the only carriers still using paper certs, and they are actively working to make this sytem electronic. Once electronic certificates surface, the phenominon of agents fogetting to collect certs all together, or of the 1,000 grace on 1 cert will likely be another good thing written forever to the history books. I'm sure someone else knows the official answer to grace miles on a cert, and they will post the book policy on this as well.

The first agent was correct and the second agent was not, just consider yourself lucky you only need to use three certs instead of four.

US has no grace distance for such calculations, and considering they are the most generous airline that uses certs in distributing them (10 per 20k for Silvers and 18 per 20k for golds) and calculating mileage for them (origin to destination, not segments individually like AA and DL) (though that may change shortly, we'll have to see what the new rules are before making the final determination), I've never really considered it a problem.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Beckles:
US has no grace distance for such calculations. . . </font>

I couldn’t agree more. On countless flights between TPA and DCA (818 miles) it’s always two certificates. The Tampa ticket folks are among the friendliest in the system but they’re accurate too!