emcampbe

Travel is not opening up, or change fees are not coming back (ex-International?).

Look, travel is opening up...but slowly, and by all means, not everything is opening, or going to open soon. US already plans to open up travel to many more people in November, and some other places are starting to open...Canada already has, for example (for vaccinated folks), but many others are not. Australia is saying they will open by Dec, but who knows? Asia is still mostly closed to foreigners.

So travel is opening up a bit, and I do wonder if from the perspective of UA (and other US-based carriers), the opening up to the US of vaccinated foreigners will be enough to have them take away change fee waivers. Not saying that's how it should be...just wondering if that's how they will interpret it. Perhaps there will be some sort of medium, where specific areas (ie, Asia) will benefit from continued waivers, while other areas (ie, Europe) will not. Or perhaps they will implement the change fees again, but will waive them for folks who ask. Who knows?

On the other hand, given the lack of change fees for travel ex-US, why they can't just implement that for around the world I'm not sure. For me, I have for several years been booking one-ways to/from Canada, because, well, it's cheaper that way. It's beyond me why, say, SFO-YYZ or SFO-YYZ-SFO would not charge change fees, but booking YYZ-SFO would. I'd guess its simply because they think they can.