I've got a bit of a weird situation with an OTA-linked FFC that I was hoping someone might be able to shed some light on and let me know if I'm missing an option.
Last year I needed to book a return flight from Turkey for my wife and infant son, in addition to getting her a return flight to recover from a planned knee surgery. Due to the surgery and the award space situation it seemed like the best option was to book a round trip business class cash ticket ESB-DEN. Ended up being about $3k, and I booked through the Amex Travel portal in order to use some MR and the Business Platinum rebate so the trip ended up costing 200k MR without any out of pocket.
They took the first leg of the itinerary back to the states, but the surgery ended up being cancelled and so we ended up needing to scrap the trip back to Turkey. Cancelled, and ended up with about $1,400 of FFC that I could see in my UA account. However when speaking to UA about it, they said that it was linked to Amex Travel and so that in order to actually redeem it I would need to go through them. Was trying to see if I could use the credit for some flights to Canada this summer, but after an hour on hold with United the Amex chat agent told me that United were telling her that the credit could only be used by my wife (expected), must be used before July 15th (expected), and that it needed to be used all at once with any remaining credit being forfeit (fine, I guess), but that also the ticket must be used for an itinerary between Denver and Europe.
It's this last bit that surprised and confused me: in all my years of flying and dealing with various flight credits and reissued tickets I haven't seen a restriction quite like this. Does this sound reasonable? If an OTA weren't involved I'd probably just try to get a supervisor to convert it to an ETC which I've had pretty good success with, but in this case the UA supervisor I'd spoken to about it said that he couldn't change it due to the OTA connection.
In any case, if I need to write it off as lost (or book a long weekend in London for my wife) I will do so, but I was wondering if anyone had had a similar situation or knew of a different avenue I could try to get at least some kind of value out of this credit.