(less than a certain fare drop, that is...)

just discovered this, and thought I would pass it along, although perhaps it's common knowledge --

I had redeemed a $300 discount delay/inconvenience certificate for a friend's travel, on a ~$430 ticket, and was pleased that the whole mailing it into Dearborn, etc. process worked fine, even from the UK. Paid for the balance on my CC.

However, by the suggestion of one of the other threads here, I decided to check the current fare out of curiosity, and it has now dropped to $301. Rrrr. I called, hoping to get the ~$130 fare difference as a voucher for future use.

But after talking to reservations, apparently you will not get a voucher for anything until the fare difference is greater than the coupon you redeemed. I.e. UA basically redefines the effective fare as your cash payment, and thus will not give you back the coupon's value (as a voucher) if the fare drops but is still higher in value than your out of pocket payment.

So they are going to deduct it first from any fare difference benefit, and only credit you when "your actual money" (as the agent put it) begins paying the portion of the fare (which they have conveniently defined in their advantage). This, as opposed to the recognition that no matter how you define whose portion of the money it is (?), it's effectively *all* your money because you would have had to pay the total fare otherwise... And if I had waited, now I would be paying just about $0 for that ticket.

Anyway, a slight thumbs down to this, but I guess in the back of my mind I knew this would happen, what with all the conditions on the certificate to begin with, and the fact that I've seen "no refund, no credit, no fare diff, etc." on VDB coupons and such before. It's just a little annoying when the price drops so much after you had conscientiously bought the ticket in advance worrying about the price increasing, and then they won't credit you because of "your money/our coupon" semantics...