Rectifying Mileage Error Past 12-mo Window
 

My husband flew LH from Vancouver to continental Europe and returned on Edelweiss Air in summer 2015 in biz class. It wasn't a full fare ticket.

I recently checked his United Mileage Plus account but found that only about 600 miles were deposited in his account. The only boarding pass that I have found is for the segment from Vancouver to Munich on LH. The fare class was P.

I understand that Mileage Plus has a rule for rectifying missing miles within 12 months of travel. However, this time, the miles were really totally missing; there were merely understated. Currently, P class fares should earn 100% of miles flown.

So, in this case, what should I do to earn as many missing miles as possible? Again, I understand that I should have discovered this error earlier, but I just would like to pick your brilliant brains to see how I can present my case in the best light. Thanks!

How was the ticket purchased? Might it have been a unpublished/bulk fare?

Which segments weren't credited? Only certain Edelweiss flight number ranges credit to MP (regardless of booking class), and the YVR-ZRH flight isn't one of them at present. I'm not sure if that was also the case in 2015.

I bought the ticket from vayama.com

My memory is that the flight code for the ZRH-Vancouver flight was shown to him as an LX flight.

*A credit is based on the operating carrier's notification. Thus, where LH operated and credit is to UA, UA simply credits what LH notifies the MP member is due. When a MP member sends in a claim, UA sends that back through the *A resolution system for a double-check. It will be up to the operating carrier of the segments in question to credit the segments and notify UA (or not).

As OP's husband missed the deadline, he is in violation of the terms & conditions of the program. Thus, UA could simply not process or the other carriers could deny or ignore. Or maybe they will all let the deadline slide (but not likely).

Nonetheless, I would submit the claim with the backup paperwork for the missing segments and a short statement asserting the proper credit he seeks.

If the claim is denied because it is late or because it is missing paperwork, there is nothing to be done.

At this point, I would worry less about the niceties of the fare basis and more about getting things rolling. I don't think that this is going anywhere, but people get lucky.

Flight number is mostly irrelevant for United. The thing that matters is the flight operator. In this case, flight number somewhat matters in that the flights must be booked as LX flights to earn anything, but it still falls under the Edelweiss earnings chart and not the LX earnings chart.

Today's flight earnings are definitely not the same as they were when the flight was taken, and unless you have the rules as of that date, you can't determine how much mileage should have been earned.

Yes, it is. It doesn't earn PQM or status bonus, but it does earn RDM.

My guess is that it was an unpublished fare. Just did a sample search for a trip on LH in J and Vayama was over $2000 cheaper for exact same flights than any other OTA's/ LH pricing. Therefore, it seems highly likely that Vayama is selling unpublished fares. While unpublished UA fares earn Mileage Plus miles, I'm doubtful that unpublished LH fares qualify as they earn nothing in the Miles&More program.

Here's an example (DTW-TXL in J 12/14 - 12/21, LH443,LH174,LH203,LH442)

Pricing from LH/OTA's $5751.53 -- $4,683.00 fare + $1068.53 taxes/fees
Pricing from Vayama $3515.87 -- $2,273.00 fare + $1,242.87 taxes/fees (including Vayama fee)

Unless UA wanted to award miles out of their own pocket as a courtesy, they have to liaise with the partner airline in missing credit situations so that the partner can pay for the miles. There's a reason for there being a time limit: each airline has to have some point beyond which they don't need to keep full records online to research such situations. It's not just a matter of having the boarding pass to verify that the flight was taken and the flight and fare were eligible: the partner airline also must verify that they didn't already award miles for the segment to its own or another partner's program. No airline is going to dip into offline records to research a transaction whose value is probably in the tens of dollars.

Also, consider the other way around: if UA were to reverse a false posting of miles to your account from 3 months ago, that might be reasonable. But what if they went back 2 years and yanked back miles for a flight they claimed was improperly posted? Are you supposed to keep records indefinitely, just in case? If you think that would be unreasonable, then I think it goes both ways. There's a reason that there's a defined period of time to correct mistakes: it sets a maximum records retention period that both sides can rely on.