winston vickers

I would like the boards opinion on a travel mix up and would like your input on the situation.

I began planning and booking a South American cruise a year ago. The cruise begins in Lima Peru and ends in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I shopped around for air on both legs and decided to purchase my return ticket on American Airlines. I cashed in miles from my United Mileage Plus account for the trip from to Lima. When I was looking for fares, United gave me an option of flying from LAS to LIM on Copa Airlines with a connection in PTY. For 2 people, the price was 35,000 miles each in Business. Taxes were $43.70 and I opted to purchase travel insurance from Allanz Global Assistance for an additional $54.00. I was given a confirmation number, I selected my seats and was given a summary of the trip and charges. I made copies of the email and filed it in my travel account.

As the trip nears, it departs on October, I was checking my travel documents and discovered that the flight from LAS to PTY was no longer operating. I went first to the United.com and entered my confirmation code and nothing appeared. I went to the Copa website and tried the confirmation and nothing came up. I called Copa Airlines and they showed no reservation. I explained to the representative that I cashed in miles from United and they directed me to United.

When I called United, I gave them the confirmation number and they informed me that the reservation was cancelled. I asked them who cancelled it and they informed me that since I didn't call United back within 24 days of making the reservation, United cancelled the reservation.

No where on my email or from United does it state that I must call them back. The only notice I had was the following statement, "We are processing your reservation and will send you an eTicket Itinerary and Reciept email once completed. This process usually takes less than an hour, however, in rare cases it could take longer."

I'll be honest and say that I only noticed the LARGE Confirmation Number and didn't see this small notice about the processing time. No where on the email does it state that I need to call them back and no where does it state that I have 24 days to call United.

The day following the original booking, I received an email from Allianz Travel Insurance stating they had received from United my request for insurance and it was approved. I have that email and what it covers.

I have gone back over my Mileage Plus account and they did not deduct any miles. I have gone over my credit card charges and United did not charge me for taxes, even though the first email listed my credit card. The insurance charge is the only charge that went through that day related to the process.

The Mileage Plus rep. didn't show a lot of support and her only option was to purchase a ticket or cash in more miles. I ended up cashing in 75,000 per person to get us to Lima, which is double what I had originally wanted to use.

My biggest question is how United can cancel without notifying me and how can they sell me and not refund me for Insurance, which by the way is still in effect.

Regards

transportprof

United never ticketed your reservation, thus there was no ticket to cancel. This happens more on exotic international tickets with partner airlines, but the bottom line is that until you have a ticket number - as opposed to a booking reservation, you don't have a valid contract with United. It sucks to find this out the way that you did, but if its any consolation, this snafu happens regularly to travelers who think they have completed a transaction with United.

How will your insurance work out? Will you be able to ge that insurance transferred to your new ticket?

WineCountryUA

Absolute utter nonsense, lazy agent. Your flight was cancelled by COPA (likely UA forgot to reconfirm with COPA) and UA did not contact you or re-schedule -- their issue

There is no requirement to reconfirm the flight within 24 days -- total made up excuse. Not uncommon for agent who don't know what happen or don't want to blame UA make up a bogus excuse.

that was a bit of a red flag but does happen even for correctly booked tickets. And the miles are usually eventually withdrawn.


Again a lazy agent. Understand the peace of mind that offered, but would have pushed back.

Call back MileagePlus once again -- ask for the UA operated IAH-LIM as alternative at the original price, it will require a supervisor to do this. If not handled satisfactorily, contact the CEO's office.

They can (if they don't charge you) but they should not.

Allianz is a 3rd party company and out UA's control -- but call them directly, explain the circumstances and ask for a refund.

In The 216

Unfortunately these things do happen even though they shouldn't. Most on here will tell you this type of thing is one of the main reason that many of us "babysit" our reservations; especially with partner flights. Now that you've cashed in the miles for a standard award ticket you best option would be to continue searching for saver space and call and make the change. Even inside of 21 days the fee is likely worth it (assuming you have no status). United runs to Lima via IAH and EWR so keep an eye on those flights in particular. You will get a lie flat to LIM if you have snag a United operated flight in saver J.

mduell

I'd complain to the DOT if UA won't help you, citing 14 CFR 399.88. I understand UA doesn't think they have an obligation if there's no ticket, but the DOT has no such ticketing requirement, they just require payment in full (which IMO you provided with your CC even if they didn't capture).

WineCountryUA

Given there was a cancelled flight, that would be a waste of time to claim a post-purchase price increase. OP accepted the new flight pricing. What might work complaining to the DOT is getting a senior customer service agent to correct the cancellation.

Kacee

I'm a bit unclear on the facts here.

CM does still operate LAS-PTY, so I'm questioning whether there was a cancellation.

Sounds to me like this is a case where the partner award didn't ticket within 24 hours, so OP never actually had a ticket, just a reservation, which vanished when the itinerary did not ticket.

MatthewLAX

This is exactly what I am thinking.

jtkohl

If the insurance policy is in effect, and the OP doesn't get any help from UA, s/he could contact the insurer on a claim of canceled reservation to get the insurance coverage to provide a flight for the cruise departure.

MatthewLAX

Correct -- I would pursue that as well.

philemer

It wasn't canceled because it never was booked. Yes?

transportprof

Sounds right to me.

Insuring attempted bookings with United would carry a much higher premium than insuring ticketed travel, I suspect.

sinoflyer

OP, I hope you have a screen shot of this statement or that it appears in the email confirmation from UA. It is proof that you had proceeded with ticketing this reservation. It is UA's fault for failing to issue the tickets, as well as not contacting you when the difficulties arose.

IMO, OP should escalate this with UA first. I am curious, however, about whether trip insurance would also take into effect. Good luck.

Often1

I suspect that OP misheard on the 24 days. It was 24 hours and it didn't matter that OP did not call back, his reservation was cancelled when CM refused it.

That is why UA issues a confirmation which clearly states that it is not a ticket and that an e-ticket will be sent when the transaction is completed.

When OP booked through UA, CM had 72 hours to confirm or else the reservation was cancelled. CM apparently did not confirm, so UA cancelled. While this process most often happens relatively instantaneously, 24 hours is the general outside.

Why might CM refuse the booking? Because it believed that it could sell the space or it wanted the space for its own elites.

First, this isn't a violation of the DOT post-purchase rule. UA never issued the ticket because CM refused the booking. UA told OP that the confirmation was not the eticket.

Second, that is the end of UA's obligation to OP. But, it will generally help its customers out an the idea of asking UA to force space (if need be) via IAH is a good one. Just have the flight numbers ready.

sinoflyer

It's possible that CM refused the booking, but we can't be 100% certain that this was what happened. For starters, CM had to have set aside the award spaces for UA's booking engine to locate, book, and attempt to ticket the reservation.

Besides, the UA booking engine can only initiate the ticketing process when all the flight segments show "HK" status (meaning that the spaces have been confirmed). In situations where the customer is asked to call back in 24 hours to find out whether OAL space can be confirmed, the status for the flights would have been "RQ" (requested) or "PN" (pending need), before changing to "HK" (confirmed) or "UN" (unable). I don't believe this applied to OP's case.

For more clarity about what actually happened, OP should inquire with the next UA agent to look into the reservation's history, and see what status codes were attached to the CM segments at the time of the original booking as well as when the segments were cancelled.