United Flight - Canceled?
 

Welcome to FT!

I believe both these services have been cancelled with service resumption from 4 June. Depending on your citizenship and/or reason for travel, you may not have been admitted to either or both countries and therefore denied boarding at IAD.

Thanks so much! Does this mean that I am entitled to a refund? I notice that the website doesn't offer that as an option, only two types of credit.

I am not 100% certain these days, so much is changing. You are heavily encouraged by UA to accept an ETC valid for two years (that would probably be ok for me), but I believe the DoT ruling says you are entitled to a full refund. You may have to initiate a chargeback on your credit card if your call with UA doesn't go well, although that option disappears if you accept the ETC.

Welcome to FlyerTalk!

Your flights have been cancelled. While UA generally rebooks automatically, there are multiple reports of that process failing.

Whether or not UA will agree to give you a refund likely depends upon what replacement option they come up with, and how close to your original flight times they're able to get you. If you want a refund, the first step is to call United and ask.

Thank you both. I will definitely call. I do not want to re-book - the tour I was going to take was canceled, and doesn't look like it will be rescheduled. Since I don't fly very often, I doubt I'd be in a position to use a credit.

"...Cancelled or is still not confirmed"
 

I took a look at an IAH-BON reservation I have for the end of June, and saw that it now states "flights in your itinerary has been cancelled or is still not confirmed." Yes, I saw the other post someone made regarding this with a flight they have in a week or so, but this is two months away! Does this definitively mean that my flights are cancelled, or are they just not sure yet?

Thanks in advance

UA pushed through an inventory update last night for June flights. Based on your message, IAH-BON will not be operating; that's the message they use when a reservation contains a flight that's no longer on the schedule. There is an outside chance that they would re-route you automatically, but there might not be an alternative available.

It's a flight that only operates once a week. The only other flight they do to BON is through Newark, but those aren't showing up either. It's strange that they would cancel a flight that is still nearly two full months out. Is it possible that they haven't straight up cancelled it b/c it may be reinstated?

It's not really that strange; they've cancelled about 90% of their flight load for May and June.

I suppose there's a possibility that it could be reinstated, but if you're trying to parse "cancelled or is still not confirmed" into "they haven't made a decision," you're mistaken. That's a generic message that appears whenever your reservation doesn't match the current schedule.

I just meant that for a company that is hurting for business and revenue, cancelling flights that are two months away seems incredibly strange to me. They also nearly DOUBLED the price of the flights they still do still have scheduled through the end of the year and beyond to over $1400 RT. But basic economy is still $700 (around what it was before), which is also weird. Maybe they're trying to force people to reschedule and pay double? I don't see how that'll fly with most people. I'd swim there before I'd pay that much for a 5 hour flight.

There are no flights to Bonaire currently operating. The likelihood of there being a robust travel market to the Caribbean by June is nil. If they kept the flight on the schedule, they'd have to cancel it anyway. They may as well go ahead and let people know now.

You're likely reading too much into this. Projected demand is down 97%. People aren't going to be rebooking this trip for another date. They'll be staying closer to home, if they're traveling anywhere at all.

If and when UA thinks they can operate flights to Bonaire with enough passenger demand to make it worthwhile, they'll open the discount buckets back up.

That’s somewhat the thing... They didn’t let me know. I got no notification of any sort. If it were flat out cancelled, you’d think I would have gotten some sort of notification. I just happened to notice it. Not to mention, doubling the price all but guarantees no demand, making it impossible for them to judge when resuming semi-profitable flights would be feasible.

Perhaps a quick call will give you some additional info.

But first decide, do you want a refund/credit or alternative routing?

Well, you'd think that. I wouldn't think that, because I know United too well. ;)

Kidding aside, UA is woeful in communicating schedule changes. (I have a reservation in the exact same state, BTW). There's a pretty good chance that they would eventually get around to sending out a notification, but the truth is, monitoring your reservations is definitely a best practice for the UA flyer.

Possibly -- but they tried offering deep discounts and weren't able to generate significant business. I think their current plan is to keep prices fairly high until they get an idea how much capacity they'll want to offer, because the last thing that they want to do is to fill up a bunch of flights with discount passengers and lock out people who would be willing to pay more.