jah294

Hi, apologies if there is another thread for this but just curious if anyone has ever heard this/run across it . . . I'll try to make this succinct.

On May 5th, I bought a ticket on United for 658.70 and used Paypal as my method of payment. I was redirected to the Paypal website, logged in, authorized the payment, received the Paypal confirmation and was ticketed. Imagine my surprise a few days later when I saw the pending United charge on my credit card (the credit card is not linked to my Paypal account but is saved in my United profile). I wasn't sure who to contact so sent a message to Refunds explaining the situation, and even though the charge was still pending on Paypal I figured I was probably the one who messed up. I traveled on that itinerary over the weekend and although the charge is still pending on Paypal, it went through on my credit card on May 7th, so I figure it will drop off Paypal soon (and has never cleared; still pending). In the meantime, I received this extremely helpful response to my note:

Dear jah294:

Thank you for contacting Customer Refund Services regarding the above referenced ticket. In order to research and/or process your claim, please contact the optional area selected for assistance. Please note associated fees may apply for research and handling as applicable.

For future travel reservations contact a Reservations representative at 1-800-525-0280.

Thank you for choosing United Airlines. We look forward to serving you again soon.

Sincerely,

Customer Refund Services

Note that they did not tell me what the "optional area selected" was.


On May 22nd, I booked another ticket for 661.01 on United and also used Paypal as my method of payment. This time I paid extra attention to ensure I didn't miss anything - same thing - redirected to Paypal, logged in, received an email from Paypal for my transaction and my ticket was issued and confirmed. Fast forward to today - lo and behold, United has again charged my credit card for the purchase. I called this time and after speaking with Reservations, Refunds, and Web Support, I was told that if you have a saved method of payment in your profile that it will ALWAYS override another method of payment selected. So essentially it was my fault that I had my credit card information saved - even though I selected Paypal and was redirected to Paypal and logged in - and never authorized the charge on my credit card, the website went ahead and overrode my Paypal request and charged my credit card anyway. I asked how this could happen since I have two credit cards saved in my profile and have used both to purchase tickets; they didn't seem to know but said "the website just works that way."

Further, the person I spoke with said there was basically no way to refund the charge to my credit card and re-charge it on Paypal since she didn't even know if their systems would allow that. I chose not to pursue it because I have experience United's IT enough to not trust it to successfully perform the transaction.

Has anyone else ever run into anything like this? Even though these are both trips I am taking (and already took one), United essentially charged $1200 to a form of payment that I did not authorize for the purchases. It just rubs me the wrong way. Am I being ridiculous? I've read Flyertalk long enough to know that you guys will tell me if I am.

aacharya

That's ridiculous. I bet it's some aspect of the system/quirk - and not a rule that they will "override" and always use your stored credit card information.

bmwe92fan

I'm betting "optional area selected" is a placeholder that the CS agent should have filled in. I have used paypal and have multiple cards stored and have never had the issue you described. I wonder if for some reason it failed / timed out after some time and then UA charged it to the next card in your profile... I suppose you could delete the card information and try to purchase again and see what happens - but that sure is a pain. FWIW - I have had much better performance and less issues using Chrome than IE - perhaps you could try a different browser next time...