climbermom

Today, my husband's assistant tried to change his outbound flight on a United ticket booked with Centurion Travel. The Amex agent told her that changing the SFO-AUS portion would require that his return AUS-SFO be cancelled and re-ticketed as well, plus a $200 change fee. Since this is the Formula 1 race weekend in Austin and the return flights are now nearly sold out, the roundtrip fare went from $659 to more than $1400. The agent insisted this was a United fee, not Amex. I refused to allow Amex to make the change and asked her to get a United agent on the phone, which she was unable to do immediately.

I then signed on to my husband's united.com account (after figuring out the reservation didn't appear there because the Amex locator had the wrong United FF number) and was able to make the change, pay the $200 change fee, and get a $34 refund because the new fare was actually a little bit less.

Has anyone ever heard of this new ticketing rule? Has anyone else had errors with Amex Centurion reservations?

UAPremExecflyer

I don't believe there is any "rule" involved here.
It could be one of a couple of things or a combination thereof:
A less-skilled agent misreading the fare rules and/or mis-applying them;
Perhaps the original ticket was booked in a fare class that AmEx had access to and it was then sold out;
The fare class was indeed unavailable when AmEx proposed to make the change. When you went to look at the booking, inventory in that fare class had become available.
Air fares are dynamically-priced depending on supply and demand.

Cana2013

This is odd. Never heard of changing the outbound portion needs to cancel the return portion. The agent must be new.

alc

I wonder if the agent just mean it need to be re-ticket as the outbound is changing... and hence fare and tax are all re-calculated.. just for some reason it is a lot more doing it with the agent vs OP doing it online.