Originally Posted by flyinbob
OK, but here's a warning for changing flights on united.com.
After you change the flight, and reprice, and even enter your credit card and pay for the change, IT DOESN'T COUNT YET. According to UA, the process still involves a live person checking your itinerary, making sure everything is ok, THEN confirming it.
My headache started when the live person confirmation didn't come until the next day, when the new itinerary priced out different than what I was charged by united.com. They then charged my credit card over $500 instead of the $159 united.com had sold me at. Fortunately I checked my credit card charge online and found it, but it still took finding the right person in Chicago to fix it.
My advice is if you proceed make sure you print out every screen in the process, especially pricing and confirmations. Until you actually fly you can't be sure what united.com will do to you. Godspeed young man. ^
This is not my experience. Every time I make the change online and it processes the charge, I get a new e-ticket number on the spot and am quite sure it has been completed at that time without being reviewed later. What you experienced I would be 99.9% sure was a fluke and not SOP.
The online exchange feature works very well IME despite all the constant bashing of it here. I have successfully used it at least a dozen times. To delete just one segment, at the bottom you can click "more options" which will bring up buttons for "delete segment". You can use this for example to completely change your itinerary by adding new future segments and deleting all your current segments one by one. You then have a completely different future itinerary (to different cities even if you wanted) that will price correctly, and if you confirm it will charge your credit card appropriately and give you a new e-ticket number. The only thing you can't do is select seats. There is also a limitation on the number of "exchanged" tickets it will process... so if your ticket has already been exchanged in the past (I think the limit is 3 times), it may not work. That is the only time I have run into problems with it.
While everyone trashes this, it has pretty much always worked for me (except for the multi-exchange issue above), and works better than the similar NW feature and surely better than the non-existent AA feature. WN is the best at this hands down. Have faith brothers... it does work!