Damn that H fee is gonna hurt


Shoot the messenger! j/k

thanks for the heads up

What makes you think that fuel surcharges would be rolled back?

They are actually not masking it - they are calling it what it is. It is a fee to upgrade/redeem inside a time window/redeposit a reward. The redeposit one will hurt a lot; the others don't affect me personally all that much.

I'm intrigued by the instant ticketing and how that is supposed to be a benefit for us as passengers. Online we've always had that option. I guess this way we also get the 24-hour change/cancel/refund on phone bookings, too. One thing this might do is formalize the forgiveness of the change fee to buy up to a higher class of service for folks who have to buy through a TA or lowest available fare for business purposes and then paying up to eiter a 100% EQM fare or a Y-up or something like that. That's the only real up-side I can see from this announcement, but it is a stretch.

Unless a "fuel surcharge" is added to reward travel, then it's definitely a mask. Make no mistake, these are policy changes.

I will give CO credit for not imposing fuel surcharges on award tickets.

I'm no fan of any of the changes, but honestly, I expected virtually all of them (except the copay increases) in light of the inevitable "mirroring" efforts that will progressively take place between United and Continental, regardless of the price of fuel.

That H fare BF upgrade fee is really going to hurt.

I agree...one of the drivers to booking H fares was the combination of higher EQM AND no copay. The benefit of booking an H fare just dropped a couple of notches...

New fees were inevitable... but I'm glad that Continental, unlike most of its competition, is protecting its most loyal Platinum Elite travelers with the least fees. ^^^

A huge to these increases, although it is good that Platinums are exempted from most.

The redeposit/change fee is going to hurt me the most.

In order to even get a BF award ticket, we have to book months in advance and sometimes as a Y ticket. There are always changes involved in these types of tickets, at least for me, because I can never book it as I need it when the seats are available.

Now my "free" tickets are going to cost me $150 because I don't think I've ever issued a ticket that I didn't need to change.

A fee is understandable, $150 is obscene. Particularly since the change could result in seats available for sale if the awards aren't released back as award seats.

That's exactly why there is money to be made from such a change fee.

Well, I think it's just about time to stop collecting airline miles, pay for the ticket I want, and switch to a hotel loyalty or cash back card.

Ditto for shopping on COs portal. Hilton just started one.

Most often, I either spend money for hotels or money for airline tickets, or a combo of both.

I guess I'll start buying my air and getting the hotel as a reward.

Out of all the changes, I care the least about the copay increases - they were a bad deal to begin with, often costing as much as a roundtrip mid-level coach fare for upgrades in both directions (except for Y and H's, of course). Even the H copay is only $100 ($200 for Hawaii), which is not totally abusive.

Now that airlines have wised up (for them) and moved from making reward seats available at 330 days and instead utilizing yield management, often times seats that are clearly going to be unsold (say a flight is only 35% full a week out) become available as rewards close in to the flight date. Those are great opportunities for airlines to clear mileage off the books without chancing losing a revenue opportunity. The close-in fee discourages travelers from helping the airline out in that regard.

I disagree, to some extent. When airlines do not make rewardseats available until withing 21 days of departure, they force passengers who need to or are willing to redeem rewards to wait until a few weeks before departure to book. That forces them to pay the close-in booking fees (and feel lucky that they found reward space to begin with).