Gavin Peters

In text rules for fares, I frequently see text like:

"CHARGE USD 300.00 FOR REISSUE/REVALIDATION.
WAIVED FOR SCHEDULE CHANGE."

I'd like to talk about this. What's a "SCHEDULE CHANGE"? How can I, as a customer of United Airlines, know what this term means?

I have read through the United Conditions of Carriage, and they give a good definition of a "Change of Schedule":

"Change in Schedule – an advance change in UA’s schedule (including a change in operating carrier or itinerary) that is not a unique event such as a Schedule Irregularity or Force Majeure Event as defined below."

But neither one answers the question we all want to know.

How many minutes qualifies as a "change in schedule"? If we have to understand the "change" in the "schedule" in plain English, it means a change by any amount, right? Even one minute?

But if there's a definition that I, as a customer, should have seen, could have seen, or such, then that applies, right?

Which is it?

WineCountryUA

What the phrase means, if you to make a change / reissue a ticket because of a airline caused schedule change, the fee is waived. Yeah I know that is sort of oblivious but it needs to be explicitly stated.

As for the time duration, elsewhere in the CoC it states UA only determines the available options in the case of a schedule. It used to be 2 hours (and before that 90 minutes and earlier 60 minutes) and then you could force certain options. That customer option is gone.

However most agents will still honor the 2 hour rule and many will let you take certain options for even less.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...me-refund.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...le-change.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...n-2-hours.html

mherdeg

Well, there's a school of thought that says that those rules ("WAIVED FOR SCHEDULE CHANGE") are meant to be read & interpreted by your travel agent. Following that school of thought, if you read the CoC carefully, you are contractually owed only what the contract of carriage says, which is that in the event that UA changes your schedule and you don't like it, you can get a similar trip or a free refund, at UA's discretion. (They don't have to reaccommodate you — they have to reaccommodate or refund you.)

In practice, check out the rules that UA gives to travel agents: https://www.united.com/web/format/pd...Parameters.pdf

(linked from https://www.united.com/web/en-US/con...t/default.aspx )

Per that document, what UA says to travel agents is that if a customer is unhappy with a schedule change, and it results in them arriving more than 2 hours late; or it involves adding a connection; or it causes a misconnect — then you can change the flight for free (booking up to 4 fare classes higher for free!!) or you can refund it for free.

UA also does not tell travel agents (but this should be documented in the contract of carriage) that if there is a carrier change you always get a fee-free change/refund; for example if your LAX-LAS flight gets a "schedule change" that changes the operator from United to United Express, you can cancel/change it for free.

In practice, UA reservations agents will help provide fee-free changes or refunds even if these conditions are not met as long as you can make a convincing case that the schedule change is inconvenient.

So there is some undocumented fuzziness and flexibility here roughly like "if the customer is unhappy and we are clearly wrong, waive change fee". For example, if the new flight leaves 1hr earlier and you're going to miss part of a meeting, agents will generally waive the change/refund fee.

zombietooth

A "schedule change" that would also be free to the customer would be one where UA tightens the connection time so much that you would be at risk of missing your next flight. In cases like that, you just call and say that you are not comfortable with the connection time, e.g. a 90 min. international to domestic connection in IAD that has shrunk to 75 min. due to a schedule change, since clearing immigration/customs in IAD can take well over an hour. UA routinely grants free changes when things like this happen.

sakaike

In practice, I have received this message on my reservations page when a flight has changed by as little as 15 minutes. This on a non-stop flight with no connections before or after. So I suspect that this message is posted automatically, without regard to individual reservations whenever a flight time changes of some unknown magnitude.