Originally Posted by
Derek Khanna
When I SDC, if my new connection is over 4 hours, the tickets are cancelled by United Corporate. When I call they say the connection was over 4 hours, after an hour on hold. This is true even when the airport does the SDC to the next morning. E.g., I have a ticket for LAX-SFO-SEA. I land in SFO at noon and push out SFO-SEA from 2PM till 8 AM. Airport lets me do it, it will be cancelled within hour.
This has happened to me pretty regularly. I would be interested in people's experience if this happens to them, what the rules are - because it's not clear. I'd also be interested if anyone has suggestions on a credit card that would help insure against the airline cancelling the ticket or some other idea. It's awful when they cancel my ticket and strand me in these cities, even as a 1K they don't comp me for hotel and other forced costs then.
Only when you push it for an overnight connection or have they actually canceled an itinerary where your connection was same-day, just over 4 hours? And only when you had someone at the airport rebook it for you, or also via app/website? While I see how UA wants to protect themselves against people circumventing the fare rules, it seems like the least they could do is (have you) call and tell you that the change you made requires payment of a fare difference.
I've had the situation once or twice where I SDC'd to a different connection on the UA website, it showed a $0 payment, but when I went ahead and booked this connection, it told me to call customer care because the ticket needed to be reissued. When I called, they told me that the connection I selected wasn't actually free, and that a fare difference of $X needed to be collected -- in which case I decided to go with the original routing.
COC obligations go both ways, and the airline cannot arbitrarily cancel your ticket after one of their employees made a change to it. Flagging you and reversing the change is one way of dealing with it, canceling out your tickets screams WDWYB at me...