WineCountryUA

At the moment FFC and ETCs are good to until 31 Dec 2023 which is more than a year away, so it is not presently possible to determine. UA has said that for cancellations in 2023, the expiration will be 12 months from booking.

fttc

I had another saga related to this. I wanted to move the dates of another existing ticket and found a suitable itinerary a couple of weeks later. So I canceled the original ticket, and tried to apply it to a new booking. Again, the FFC option in the payment section did not find it even given the confirmation #. And starting from the cancelled ticket did not find the routing I wanted. So I called, and gave the agent the exact flight numbers. Except this time, the agent couldn't find one leg. She said she had many choices showing up, except the one I wanted which was a partner flight. But she merrily told me that I could just buy the new ticket and ask for the refund of the original FFC. She confidently stated that the refund dept understands as long as I explained. Out of options since my original had already been cancelled, and the only way to get the new routing is buying the ticket on the website without any FFC, i took that advice and bought the ticket with new money, and filed for a refund request of the FFC with explanations.

The next day, I got an email that the refund was rejected. So I called, and the agent talked to the refund dept and came back and told me that the request was rejected automatically without human review. So she's going to file it for manual review. After a while, she found out she didn't have authority though and transferred me to another agent. The second agent was adamant that it's not refundable no matter what. So I asked for a supervisor. After repeating my story the third time to the supervisor, she was quite understanding and went ahead and filed the refund request for me.

I then went to check the refund webpage the next few days. I found more fishy stuff going on there. Every day I checked, the refund process by date is shifted later, and it's always 14 days after the date I checked. I can't imagine they can't keep track of date of the request. Again I think it's done on purpose. So after more than a week, I called in again. The agent talked to the refund dept for a while and told me it's rejected again. But he miraculously offered to connect me with the refund dept. I of course insisted on the opportunity. (The previous agents all told me that refund dept doesn't talk to anyone other than their own agents.) Then he went to talk to the refund dept again for a long while, and came back telling me that it's still under manual review. The next day I finally got an email saying the refund of the FFC will go back to my CC.

I have been seriously considering filing a DOT complaint on this against United. It certainly is pushing the boundary and semi-scamming people. Not showing valid FFC (which I have been 0 for 2) when buying new tickets will force people to spend new money while leaving old money potentially to waste. Only allowing FFC to be used from a change perspective, which means the IT knows that you are using FFC, thus only providing limited and less optimal routing/pricing means people are getting less value out of FFC than what free change claimed by United should be.

I'm not sure anything will happen if I file the complaint now though. DOT will just forward it to United for comment, and United will just reply that it's resolved since they are refunding my money.

serpens

But it isn't resolved. The issue is that United made it very difficult to accomplish what should have been simple, and provided misleading and contradictory information along your journey. In other words, don't complain that United hasn't refunded your money; complain that United gave you the runaround, multiple times.

catbox9

How does it work if you have an international itinerary r/t and want to cancel after you already complete the first portion of the trip?

I'm flying USA-DUB/DUB-USA next month but some friends planned a last-minute trip to SGN and invited me so I think it would be easier just to fly DUB-SGN rather than DUB-USA-SGN.

I'm also going to Dublin again in November so I could change the dates on the DUB-USA flight, but then I still need to get to Dublin and from what I can tell the USA-DUB r/t price is only about $100 more than the USA-DUB o/w price so it doesn't really make sense to do that.


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I sort of tested this in July. I was scheduled to fly USA-OSL/BGO-USA but due to an SAS pilot strike I gave up on the Norway trip after I got there and flew to DUB and then used miles to fly home LHR-USA and was able to chat with an agent and get them to change my BGO-USA segment to a domestic r/t flight but I think they screwed something up because the ticket they booked had a cash price of way more than than BGO-USA segment should've been worth.......and they still issued me an ETC afterwards?!?!

jsloan

If you voluntarily cancel DUB-USA, you'll end up with two options:

1 - Add a return flight that can be combined with your outbound.
2 - Re-price to a one-way and ask for a travel credit for the difference (which may be at the agent's discretion).

If a round-trip is only $100 more than the one-way, then that's about how much credit you'd have.

Do you have enough frequent flyer miles to redeem a one-way award to DUB? Then, you could change the return date, as you suggest. Note that the outbound flight may be repriced if the new return date doesn't fit the original fare conditions -- specifically, check to see if your fare has a maximum stay before trying this.

Yeah, that sounds like a mistake. Normally you wouldn't be able to combine a domestic roundtrip with a one-way outbound flight, even if they were calling this INVOL (which it would really only be if your flight had been affected directly by the strike). Chalk that up to good fortune, but it's not an indication of any sort of policy.