Originally Posted by danville 1K
My personal experience has been in the case of a disaster they pull out the stops to get you out (or back), even if it may mean changing airports to make it happen. I think that would probably fall under the "standard change fees" section. Perhaps I was just lucky, or extraordinarily nice to the agent on the phone, or both.
The only real reason I can see the 1P Reservations line telling
abramom not to go to MCO from FLL was that they had no clue how many folks were going to hit MCO and that
abramom was better off staying put at FLL and trying to get out from there.
When the President's Day snowstorm in Feb 2002 shut down the East Coast, I was trapped in BWI with a US ticket BWI-LGA and a UA ticket JFK-SFO-SEA. Since US was an absolute basket case, I asked UA at BWI if I could fly back to SEA from there, instead. They promptly booked me BWI-ORD-SEA (US refunded the half of my BWI-LGA fare under their post-storm procedures).
Chances are quite good that in person at MCO, UA would have accepted
abramom's FLL-IAD ticket for travel MCO-IAD. The phone agents probably didn't have the authority to do this, or might have done it if
abramom was already in MCO and standing in line for a ticket agent (they could have made the changes then, saving the ticket agent the time).
In the end, it was just no different then if
abramom had called UA on any given Friday and asked to buy a ticket from MCO to IAD. So UA charged the full $1096 walk-up fare.