Originally Posted by
WineCountryUA
Not sure what you are expecting but since you did use the outbound, your refund will be for just the return portion.
You might say 1/2 refund is appropriate but UA will look at the outbound ticket and if a higher fare class than the return, the split will not be 50/50 and it is very plausible the this would lead to a less than 50% refund or more than 50% refund. Without the ticket / fare construction details it is impossible to tell.
The fact you independent rebooked yourself let UA off the hook for what you purchased. That may be hard to take but that is the way it works.
This, exactly.
I had a similar situation. Booked round-trip JFK-TLV on American in biz. American cancelled my outbound flight two days prior to travel and would not rebook me on another airline, they said they'd rebook me on a later date (that didn't work for me). I asked them to keep the return open because I could not get a business class ticket at anywhere near the same price at such a late date; they agreed to do so and to provide me with a refund for the outbound. They sort of screwed it up a couple of times (tried to give me a credit, gave me the wrong amount, then tried to refund the credit and somehow gave me a new smaller credit) but ultimately refunded me the full amount for the outbound flight, which did not even cover a last-minute one-way ticket in a middle seat economy on another airline.
It was clear that they were not going to pay for me to do my own thing, whether I liked it or not, so I just booked myself there on the cheapest ticket I could find, and took my original flight back in the class I had paid for.
For reference, I paid around $2400 round trip for biz, they broke it down as ~$725 outbound, $1675 return. The new one-way coach cost me around $750, and I got to keep my return in biz. C'est la vie.