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.