Originally Posted by
Weekend Away
Unfortunately it's rebook and pay the fare difference. I'm not interested in paying double what I initially paid. Usually it's whomever your travel agent is, which I figured was Chase/Expedia. I'll give MU a call. Thanks !
MU should rebook you than Chase/Expedia reissue the ticket to reflect the itinerary. That is how normally Expedia would do, if no Chase get involved.
Please do let the community know what eventually happens. We hope you can get reaccommodated with just a reissuance of ticket without having to pay fare difference.
It is not uncommon the airline has schedule change and then the auto-rebooking does not take into account of the connection flight. I once had AC canceled our afternoon flight YUL-FLL and rebooked us in a morning flight departing when we would still on the AC CDG-YUL flight! The whole itinerary was on AC as a UA award ticket. Called AC and then UA and they squared out the misconnect.
Quite often the airlines would need to "take control" of the reservations, i.e. moved from the OTA to them, before they can accommodate. This can be done by UA, AA, DL as far as I know. Some agents are more helpful than others but it can be done.
Unfortunately with Chase UR, there is an additional, very opaque layer inserted there. To the airlines, tickets are booked THRU Expedia. To Expedia, tickets are booked by UR, paid by Chase thru whatever agreement they have, and the same applies to cardholder. This makes reaccommodation on schedule changes exceedingly difficult.
My recent experiences with the "Chase Ultimate Reward powered by Expedia" show a few things that we all need to be aware -
1) the inventory is NOT identical to Expedia.
2) the pricing almost always is 10 to 15% higher on international stuff - be it hotels or airline tickets. Domestic stuff the padding is commonly at 5% sometimes there is none.
3) it is major headache when flight schedule changes and itinerary needs to be rebooked - this marked a MAJOR difference comparing if you book your ticket with Expedia, not to mention book directly with airlines. Even booked thru the regular OTA channel, you are far better reaccommodated than if you book thru UR.
My conclusion is, DONT book anything in far future as schedule changes are inevitable, also try to keep itinerary as simple as possible. Else gamble your luck that things a) dont go wrong. b) should things go wrong, you would be super lucky to get someone to help you from the "Chase Powered by Expedia" dept. - they are part of Expedia but not the consumer side and from the bits and pieces fished out on calls, they are strictly bound by the books, and how the system spit out - nothing manually done is allowed.