Originally Posted by
jsloan
In this case, it's not entirely clear that the agent is wrong. I mean, I think the agent is wrong, and WineCountryUA and Kacee both indicated that you can do this, and I'm 100% certain you can do it after you've taken the outbound. But I'm not sure that the agent isn't technically correct when you're trying to make this particular type of change prior to departure, especially if your ticket was fared as a round-trip.
My skepticism here stems mostly from the fact that this all breaks down if the trip was constructed with round-trip fare components, like a hypothetical SFO-LHR. Should you be able to drop the return with no change fee then? After flying the outbound? In many cases re-faring will require an add/collect because of the difference in fare, and I doubt UA wants to empower front-line agents to make this distinction. No-showing the return will get you out of the bind, but...
Originally Posted by
jsloan
OP: As crazy as this sounds, UA (and most airlines) actually forbids buying a ticket and then not using it. I mean, they won't drag you onto the plane
, but it's contrary to their contract of carriage (it's called throwaway ticketing). When you bought the ticket, they gave you a discount in exchange for some conditions; one of the conditions was that you would fly the itinerary as purchased or pay the necessary change fees to change it to something else. Now, they're known to be reasonable, and they understand that when the remaining credit is less than the change fee, few people are going to pay that fee, which is why I'm surprised that you ran into an agent who was being a stickler about it. But they're not wrong,
per se -- they're just being pigheaded.
This, of course. If you make a habit of saving money by cutting these corners, UA absolutely will send you a debit memo and take your account to collections if you don't pay up (cheaper and easier for them than suing).