Hi all, got a question, hopefully someone can answer.

Last Christmas, my wife showed up at ORD to travel to DEL. UA would not let her travel (she did not have two empty pages in her passport, and so she technically did not meet the published visa requirements for India).

My son and I left on the flight, whereas we paid $300 to change my wife's flight to the next day; she obtained a new confirmation number, and new flights, and she attempted to get extra pages in her passport.

We quickly realized that the US doesn't do extra passport pages any more, so we canceled the reservation, and she instead went the next day on a different airline, on the theory that they would not check for two empty pages (she made it to India, no problem).

Now, nearly one year later, we tried to use the residual value of her canceled ticket. UA is saying that the value is gone, because the ticket was originally issued October 30th of last year. But what happened at the airport when we paid $300? Wasn't the ticket re-issued at that point, and isn't that when the clock should start from? Isn't a re-issue exactly what you are paying for? The sympathetic agent I talked to on the phone just now said, "usually, but at the airport they can do things that we can't do here" and that the $300 change fee did not restart the clock. She and her supervisor were unable to help. She documented all of this and suggested I call the 1K line in the morning, that perhaps they could help.

Thoughts? Have we just lost a heap of money assuming that the change fee reset the clock?