dparkinson

Have a ticket booked that was AUS-US stopover-EU. The US-EU segment was cancelled due to COVID so I put in a refund request for the unused portion beyond the stopover point. Was informed the audit team looked at my refund and I was owed 494.00, but the receipt says my PQP for the segment should be 792.00. If PQP is supposed to be dollar for dollar my fare, shouldn’t the refund be more than one to one, as PQP doesn’t even include taxes? I called back and was told that refunds didn’t know what a PQP was but that the 494 was right.
Thoughts/next avenues? DoT? Customer Care?

jsloan

OK, so this is going to get extremely complicated, extremely quickly.

The short answer is that the PQP estimates are supposed to match the fare paid when they're added together, but they use a different calculation to prorate them on a segment-by-segment basis.

In many cases, PQP appears to be based upon the mileage of the different segments. However, refunds on a through fare are based upon calculating the ratio between the full fares. IIRC, if your flight was SYD-SFO-LHR, one-way, your refund would be (amount paid) * (SYD-SFO full fare) / (SYD-SFO full fare + SFO-LHR full fare), although I can't find this documented anywhere and I'm not 100% certain it's accurate.

In the very likely case that you no did not save the original fare construction, someone might be able to recreate it from the cities and dates involved for all legs (flown and unflown), the fare classes (from your receipt), and the ticketing date (also from your receipt).

There can also be currency conversion differences if either the fare or your credit card was priced in AUD.

dparkinson

The fare basis is PFF0ZUMA. Eu-us-aus-us-eu, with all but us-eu flown.

findark

How much was the original ticket? It sounds like YQ is not being refunded, which is a bit off. At least with random cities and dates, I see EUR 3,200 / GBP 3,200 of YQ.

PaulInTheSky

For sure there will be YQ from EU-US-AU, but would there be YQ specifically from US to EU? I don't know how the fare is being constructed, but for example, let's say we have the UK-US RT fare, I don't know whether UA will refund the YQ of the return portion of the ticket. From US to EU, there is usually minimal YQ.

dparkinson

jsloan

That's not enough information to be able to help. We'd need the cities and dates involved also, including for the legs that have already been flown, and we'd need the ticketing date.

I believe -- not 100% certain -- that YQ should essentially be considered part of the fare for the purposes of this calculation.

cfischer

you'll want to look at the fare construction. It is not always split equally. Had a $2k fare to Europe which even by PQP was split $1200 vs. $800 for in/out-bound. That being said the YQ is likely the problem here and they applied at least some of that for the domestic portion of the trip. Will get really tricky to resolve.

findark

This gets messy enough to potentially not be solvable. It's not clear what should happen with the YQ (it sounds like OP has a substantially different fare than what I found e.g. FRA/LHR-SYD PFF0ZUMA today). Any full fares being used for a ratio will have completely different YQ schedules (US to Australia historically has no YQ), and I also don't know of a source for historical YQ values anyway.

Often1

This not a phone call. Rather, send a note asking for a breakdown of the refund and how it is calculated.

dparkinson

Ticket was:
FCO-EWR-SFO-MEL/SYD-SFO (stop)-MUC
P Fare purchased 11/15

jsloan

We'll also need the scheduled dates of travel (all legs). And, as findark pointed out, this may not be solvable. I'll take my best guess, as an intellectual exercise, but it's going to come with caveats.

dparkinson

fair enough
FCO-MEL 11/16
SYD-SFO 12/2
SFO-MUC 5/20

cfischer

any access to fare construction? The problem is the Oz fare have no YQ so what you list is probably legit. You can try and parse it out better with something like that (which is from an A fare to ICN from 2 years ago): FC BOS UA X/WAS UA TYO UA SEL 667.00AFX4ZRMB UA X/SFO UA BOS 667.00AFX4ZRMB 1S100.00 NUC 1434.00 END ROE 1.00 XT5.50YC7.00XY5.00XA35.00US7.50AY5.10OI20.40SW27.3 0BP270.40YQ13.50XF BOS4.5IAD4.5SFO4.5

jsloan

OK. That fare is still available; it's an AMS-SYD fare with zero-base-fare add-ons at each end. I simply could not get it to come up without putting a stopover into both directions of travel, but when I do that, I get this fare construction:

The specific taxes are going to depend upon which set of airports you transit, but the taxes should fall out of the calculation anyway. Also, one NUC = one USD, so I'll just use USD for simplicity.

So, we've got $1030.38 in base fare plus, presumably, $604 in YQ -- there's no reason to think that it's not symmetrical. That's a total of $1634.38.

Now, we need to do the proration. SYD-SFO one-way J is €7446 base fare. SFO-MUC one-way J is €9771.

So, my calculation is that the unused portion of the ticket should be worth 56.8% of the total, or $927.55.

If they prorate by mileage instead, SFO-MUC is 5,879 miles and SYD-SFO is 7.417 miles. So, the unused portion would only be worth 44.2% of the total, or $722.67.

​​​​​​​If you remove the YQ entirely from the total, you get $585.26 with the fare-based proration and $455.43 with the mileage-based proration.

AFAIK, there are no arrival taxes in Europe, so the only taxes that would be added back on are the TSA fee ($5.60) and PFC charges for the airports you visit ($4.50 for a nonstop, or $9 if you stop in one or more US locations).

Long story short: I can't reproduce UA's numbers. The only one that even comes close is the mileage-based proration, ignoring the YQ entirely, but I can't see any conditions under which that's the right value.

​​​​​​​I agree wth Often1. Send a note and ask for an explanation of the calculation used.

I once had MKE-DEN-CYS scheduled, and then DEN-CYS was removed from the schedule that day, so I had them drop the last leg. When I wrote in for a refund, it was declined, saying that there was no residual value. This was clearly nonsense, so I filed a DOT complaint and they basically said "oops, we made a calculation error" and gave me the refund, plus an ETC for the inconvenience. So, it's not impossible that UA has made a mistake here, but it's really, really difficult to be sure.​​​