Originally Posted by
edcho
IMO -- the VX policy wasn't in place until the announcement on 3/22. While it would've been a nice gesture on behalf of VX to waive those charges (and slightly surprised they didn't), they are well within their rights since you purchased the award ticket with the knowledge that you were going to be dinged a fuel charge.
I did notice that you are an elite but not an VX elite? One way that you could've gotten around that is to status match to VX (to avoid redeposit fee which I'm assuming is the fee you ended up paying).
They can certainly reissue reward tickets administratively without imposing a $100 reward redeposit fee to do so. There's no reason that this fee can't be waived -- it costs them nothing. The fee isn't even designed with this scenario in mind: it's intended to discourage people from canceling free tickets (thus wasting inventory) without penalty. It's not like VX incurs a cost to reissue tickets or suffers a loss of inventory.