PQD when changing to lower priced flight
 

I bought a flexible fare ticket for a trip last week and ended up changing my return flight to what turned out to be a lower-price seat. As a result, the trip earned 400 PQDs instead of the anticipated 600. 1KVoice said they couldn't change the earned PQDs but they didn't explain why.

Does anyone know what the rules are? The change I made was several days before the flight, but would the result have been the same if I had done an SDC instead? Not too big a deal. But I suppose it may matter when doing that last trip of the year that will get you the exact PQDs you need.

Thanks.

Did you get a refund for the fare they claim isn't included in PQD? It would seem to me that if you paid the same fare for the ticket and were not issued a refund (compare the fare parts of the before and after change receipts) then the PQD should be based on the fare paid for the ticket - not the fare you would have paid on the date of change. Basically - does UA still have the money? And if so, should you be getting it back?

On that note, if you had a flexible-refundable ticket, are you sure they didn't refund the rest to your form of payment?

If you changed a flexible fare into a cheaper ticket, the difference should have been refunded to your original form of payment (and hence not PQD eligible).

OP - What happened to the ticket savings? If fully flexible, there should be a refund for the fare difference to your original form of payment and that would account for lower PQD.

But, need the specifics of the transaction to answer you.

I understood the fare to be non-refundable, though I don't know whether that was due to the outgoing flight being S class. In any case, no refund was offered when I changed the return flight nor do I see a refund on my credit card.

What is odd is that the revised receipt still shows the same price breakdown but lists only the lower PQD earning for the return flight (perhaps because it was issued after I had already taken the outgoing flight?).

To be more specific, the original flight was ticketed as follows:

DEN-SEA: Class S (164 PQD)
SEA-DEN: Class U (408 PQD)

The return was changed (after flying the outgoing segment) to:

SEA-DEN: Class V (253 PQD)

Ticket cost was (and remains) $571.16 plus $71.44 taxes, etc.

Before you worry about PQDs, I’d be wondering where the fare difference went (although this may be a case of someone traveling on someone else’s dime, so they care more about their own PQDs than their employer’s money).

I called United and learned that I was eligible to receive the difference in fare in the form of a travel certificate. They corrected whatever glitch caused the ticket to not reprice correctly and the certificate eventually made it into my inbox. So thank you all who responded for making me realize that non-refundable doesn't mean what I thought it meant.

In UA's case, nonrefundable means that UA has the money and will not return it but as in this case the "refund" will be a credit toward a future flight. So, they still have your money, but they are letting you use the fare difference for a future UA flight.

Sorry like you were able to make the change without a change fee. Was this a Same Day Change (SDC)?

On a multi-segment ticket, the most restrictive fare rules of any segment apply to the entire ticket (all segments) even if some segments are more flexible. When you mix refundable and no-refundable segments, all the segments are non-refundable

Makes sense.

The way the fare was calculated was your original ticket was $164 for the outbound, $408 for the return, =~$571 plus taxes.

Your new fare was $164 + $253 = ~$417 plus taxes because V ($253) was available instead of U ($408).

They "re-validated" the ticket without repricing correctly. Most likely that means that they didn't collect a change fee (that they should have collected - presumably $200 with that S fare on the outbound).

So what should have happened was:
Collect $200 change fee, then issue ~$154 travel certificate.

What instead happened was revalidation and even exchange.

If they collected the $200, it's a bit weirder, but either way the agent screwed up the process and it seems to be corrected now.

As a side note, and we can leave the ethics of this for another day, you could have had them rebook you in U class and then they would collect only the change fee (if they bothered to collect it at all). You could still probably argue your way into that if you have no/limited use for the e-cert.

Moved discussion of "flexible" tickets to https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unit...on-please.html

WineCountryUA
UA coModerator