audryte

Since LH award seats in F frequently don't open up until a few days before the flights, I had to book what was available at the time (a week out) and "cancel" (or delay travel) without redepositing miles. At the time of cancellation (a day before the original travel date), there was no open F seats for my itinerary for on LH, on NH, on OZ…

SuperFlyBoy

Why did they collect the extra 2,500 miles?

KosherKimchee

More importantly, why on earth would you change an OZ F segment to LH? Do you prefer robots and bad food?

cshel

Because they want to be driven to the plane in style

slice

Is there any rhyme or reason as to why you can sometimes change an award online, and other times you cannot?

I am trying to change cabin (J to F), and weeks ago I was able to search for new legs using the "change" feature. Now when I try, I just get an error before any options load. I have a feeling that calling and HUCA'ing will be a long, and likely unsuccessful process. I also don't want to get the PNR all marked up by an overzealous agent.

Any advice as to how to get this done? Flight departs in 1 week. Thanks.

villox

I've never been able to figure it out. If it was ever manually priced, you'll never be able to change it online. I've also noticed that if you try doing it once and it errors out, you won't be able to make any changes online unless you call and make a change, and then after that it would let you make changes again.

One thing you might try doing (and I have no idea if this would work) is call and see if you can get an agent to simply "reissue" the ticket. Tell them that something isn't showing up on the partner site correctly and you want to see if that would fix it. Maybe then it will remove whatever flag is set that prevents the changes online. Just a thought.

FindAWay

Another datapoint - I was able to (over the phone because .bomb wasn't properly displaying OS business class availability) change the following original routing:

ORD-(UA)-YYZ-(LH)-MUC--(LH)-GVA (destination)
(open jaw return) VIE-(OS)-WAW-(LO)-ORD (loooong stopover)
ORD-(UA)-SJU (double open jaw)

to:

ORD-(OS)-VIE (destination)
(open jaw return) ZRH-(LX)-WAW-(LO)-ORD (loooong stopover)
ORD-(UA)-SJU (double open jaw)

(each segment in business and no changes to dates)

over the phone with the first US-based reservation agent who answered in less than 15 minutes with a $50/pax change fee (Silver) and no change in miles (102.5k/pax) (but also a $77 refund in taxes).

Hendo5698

Two quick questions for making changes.

1. When changing one segment of a multi segment flight, IE switching ORD-FRA-BKK, do all flights need to show saver availability to make the change online?
Currently I have ORD-FRA UA F and FRA-BKK TG F.
I would like ORD-FRA LH F and FRA-BKK TG F.
Can I make this change online if FRA-BKK is not available at saver level? Will I need to call in to make that change?

2. BKK is a stopover with a continuing flight to DPS the next day, will that affect anything, or is that essentially its own segment?

FindAWay

I had wondered the same...I'm pretty confident the answer is that .bomb will give you an option to keep your existing first flight even if award availability isn't currently there. When I was looking for changes to my itinerary online, this seemed to be the case (I.e, I was presented with connection options that included my existing first flight even though there was not currently saver availability).

See if the website let's you - my guess from attempts to change my itinerary online is that you probably will be able to do it online because you can select to change only some of the one-ways.

Once you start trying a change on the website, you should be able to just cancel the attempt if you're unable to do what you want.

jackal

For the same reasons as mentioned in a subsequent post (want to preserve the ticket but can't book anything else yet, as LH has 0 F space open later this year), I was thinking of doing the cancel-but-don't-redeposit method. Where are these reports of UA doing an involuntary redeposit? I'd like to read up on them more to understand what this function actually does.

audryte

According to the rep, they had to put something in to allow for future changes. I was too exhausted to argue, and honestly, didn't even expect this to work on a cancelled (albeit not re-deposited) itinerary.

audryte

Oh, I hear you! As it happens, I do indeed need to travel on this particular date, and LH was the only option in F (not counting UA).

Kacee

Auto Forced Redeposit Cancelled Award.

jackal

Thanks. One report doesn't a new policy make, so I guess I'll just keep checking and see if there's something I can change it to to preserve it, but I may have to go this route out of necessity. So maybe I'll be statistic #2 to confirm that UA has indeed made this a policy...or maybe it will work for me.

james84

Was unsuccessful in trying to change my itinerary without a reprice. Was trying to go from RDU(I)-ORD(I)-MUC(O)-BKK(I)-SIN to RDU(X)-IAD(O)-FRA(O)-BKK(I)-SIN with a date change as well. Called twice today and along the way someone made a note on the PNR so calling back no longer helps. Incredibly frustrating to say the least.