Ghost "Future Flight Credit" , missing FFCs on UA.com
 

This past year has been rough. Duh. And at first I was super appreciative of United's seemingly liberal flight credit policies. Allowing you to just cancel flights with no penalties during covid sounds great. I know that if I kept perfect records of all credits issued, I should be able to use them without a hitch. But if you are like most (or at least like me), you don't have anything resembling this mythical perfect record, and covid has been going on for quite some time now.

As I was about to book a flight, I noticed that here was a message at the top right saying I had two future flight credits. Awesome, I thought, and wanted to use those against my current booking. Problem is, they don't show anywhere, and spending 50 minutes with a rep on the phone has not surfaced them either. Clearly they are making the system of redeeming arcane so that they will have fewer of them. But I digress. Not planning on fighting those particular windmills today.

Does anybody have a good approach for locating future flight credits or certificates?

Are you signed in?
Go to "My Account"
I see a stack of them for me on the summary page.

What do your records show?
Do you have two unused flight credits?

In My Account, do you see

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...8e0b96c7a0.png
Note my FFC is from pre-COVID

Are these FFCs or ETCs? They show up in different areas.
Have you check cancelled flights?

If this a ghost credits, it is just as likely ( or more likely) UA is miss reporting.:D

Like the previous poster, I don't see any missing FFCs or ETCs.

I don't think you are able to use multiple FFCs on the same booking - someone correct me if I am mistaken.

In my experience, I certainly had no issues viewing my credits when I had them last year.

If there is an offender in "hiding" credits, I would nominate Delta.

Not really. It's much more likely that the system is simply wrong. United tells me that I have a future flight credit. I don't.

If there are any credits, they'd be attached to the canceled reservations to which they correspond.

If the agent can't find them, they probably don't exist.

Correct. FFCs are really just a PNR with the segments canceled, and so they hold the value of the original itinerary. Just like you can't combine or connect PNRs, you can't do it with FFCs either - they are essentially the same thing. For ETCs, you can only apply one passenger, so on a single person PNR, you can't use more than one, although I seem to recall agents had a way to do it - though that's mostly moot now as agents can combine multiple ETCs into one now, and so you can do it that way.

I have a separate spreadsheet with all of mine. There seem to be always 1 or 2 that are missing (sometimes when it’s issued in a companions name). I’ve never had a problem using them though.

I also track everything in a spreadsheet & have 1 or 2 FFC credit PNR's that do not show up in the future flight credit tab. But if I go to my "Cancelled" flights, the missing PNR is there & when I click on it & it shows a FFC like the other PNR's in the FFC tab. Not sure why?

Moral of the story. Track the stuff that is important to you. Especially if UA owes you something :)

Echoing the last 2 posts, I also keep a record of FFCs and ETCs there always seems to be 1 or 2 missing. I can eventually always find them, but there is definitely something fishy that they are not there in the first place.

File this under "no good deed goes unpunished." ETCs weren't visible on the account -- at all -- until last year. And FFCs were never called out -- you had to know to go to your canceled itinerary page and look them up, and/or save the PNR. The new system, while imperfect, is a significant improvement over the old one and almost certainly has led to a decrease in breakage.

Ghost "Future Flight Credit" from flights taken
 

Hi everyone,
I had a flight originally booked through Air Canada with flights operated by UA. There was an Air Canada PNR and a United PNR which I added on My Trips at United.com. I had to make some flight changes but ultimately the trip in and outbound were both completed and the ticket was used and PNR ultimately closed.
For some reason, on United.com, the website is now showing that I have a Future Flight Credit for some reason, and there's no way to remove or delete that trip from my profile. It pulls up that reservation under the Future Flight Credit tab, but when I click details, it gives me an error (likely because there really isn't a credit and it's a ghost Future Flight Credit).
Anyone else having the same issue or experience deleting a reservation off of the MileagePlus profile? The call center/chat were obviously not too helpful. Wondering if I'm the only one...
Thanks!
https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...583ce27ee7.png
https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...082fb34a51.png

Well, I also have a ghost flight credit. I hadn't worried about trying to delete it, though -- I can't even tell for sure where it's coming from. I figure it'll clean itself up eventually.

I have one in my account.

The original itinerary (ticket #2) was auto-canceled due to a schedule change of a different itinerary (ticket #1) since the new time of ticket #1 would meant missing ticket #2. Asked an UA agent to reinstate ticket #2, and canceled ticket #1 after reinstatement.

To this date, having already flown the itinerary, my account still shows it in the future flight credit section. Not a big deal to me.

The interesting part of the auto-cancellation -> reinstatement - the updated ticket booked into a higher fare bucket, and I got more PQPs than what I paid for :)

Thanks! Do we think it’ll likely expire after some time even if the PNR doesn’t work anymore and the tickets were flown and used?

I think that. I don't claim to speak for anyone else, though. :)