To fill in some gaps …
The 2 tickets cost me a total of $830.62 plus 60,000 miles so really not that good redemption value. Given that intra-Europe flights are very competitively priced, I may have come out ahead if I just bought the intra-Europe segments for cash. I would not be restricted to *A airlines and the routings would have been more direct. For e.g. I could go non-stop from BUD to PRG on CSA without going to VIE (I don’t need to go to VIE). All that to put into proper perspective comments about the airline losing money and the customer saving money.
United is a business. It can choose to offer a frequent flyer program or not. It can administer the program as per its policies. The issue for me is not the FF program but the cancellation of an issued ticket regardless of the form of payment. I am a business owner myself (completely unrelated to the travel industry, I might add) and have never experienced frustration from clients not satisfying my unspoken or unwritten expectations. I expect clients to act out of self-interest, and it works well when my business goals and my clients’ goals coincide, but I do not expect or demand my clients to act in my interest, that is just silly to me. It is bad business practice to have unwritten secret rules that confuse employees and customers. I fly for personal reasons internationally twice a year and very rarely domestically so nowhere near as frequently as some of the FTers.
It is understandable that others may act differently under the same set of circumstances and it is within their right to do so. The discussion on ethics can get very involved so I will only briefly mention that if I have a ticket issued within the rules of the program using the proper procedure and involving trained UA employees (not incapacitated in any way) then it is not a question of ethics at that point. To characterize ambiguity in the rules as the spirit of the program is not appropriate. I want to do everything that I can to preserve the benefits for others but to allow an airline to act arbitrarily at any point does not benefit us in the long run.
Mistake? I don’t see the argument that the UA reservations agent, UA reservations supervisor, and the UA system all made a mistake simultaneously in issuing the tickets. Further I am assuming UA has a procedure for issuing the ticket which was followed internally.
UA is only responsible for destination and stopover? If an ordinary (non-FT) customer goes on the UA web site and chooses the multi-city option and buys a ticket for example LAX/LHR/BRU/HEL with the two stops in LHR and BRU being less than 24 hours because he has business meetings in those two cities, UA is thinking it is only responsible for getting the customer to HEL? This seems to defy logic and the reasonable expectations of a prudent person.
UA cancelled the ticket because I refused a routing option? United reissued the ticket and sent me a confirmation email with the updated routing. The UA reservations agent charged me for the additional taxes and told me they were going to honor the ticket. Then she said the supervisor wants to talk to you. The supervisor was belligerent and hostile from the start. Not because of anything I said. His mind was already made up before he started talking to me. He had already decided to cancel the ticket because it had too many stops. In fact, I think the only reason he wanted to talk to me was to advise me the tickets are being cancelled.
It seems to be more of a pricing issue that these itineraries were issued for x number of miles. UA would definitely issue those segments separately costing more miles. Fact is, the itineraries were priced by UA’s reservation system. Fact is, UA’s reservation agents rely on the system to spit out the price, they do not manually price itineraries.
This is a good learning experience since most of the comments have been knowledgeable, respectful and well thought out. Frankly, I did not expect total agreement or consensus. Thank you!