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I noticed a new addition to United’s interactive award chart today.
At the bottom of the page, United has added the sentence: “United reserves the right to refuse or cancel any awards redeemed for travel listed at an incorrect or erroneous mileage amount.”
What does it mean? Does United really have a right to cancel your awards?
I’m not totally sure what United is trying to accomplish with the new addition to the award chart.
Maybe it’s a belated addition to the chart to cover situations like the Four Mile Mistake Fare to Hong Kong that came up in July 2012.
In the Four-Mile-Mistake-Fare-to-Hong-Kong saga, United priced award tickets to Hong Kong properly on every screen of the award booking process until the final payment screen when it displayed a price of 4 miles.
United cancelled those tickets–though some people flew their tickets immediately before the cancellations that happened several days later–and the Department of Transportation backed United up.
Ostensibly the DOT backed United up because it had displayed the price correctly on every screen until the last one when the ludicrous price of 4 miles displayed, so that everyone who booked it must have known that the last price was a mistake when their award price dropped from 70k miles to 4.
But is United trying to claim it can now unilaterally cancel tickets in other circumstances?
For instance, imagine united.com was mis-pricing an award in your favor by 20,000 miles and you ticketed it. You don’t even realize the mistake and you book hotels and tours around the plane tickets. Months pass.
Does United think it can cancel that award? Would the DOT back United up? Does this sentence on the award chart strengthen United’s position in any way?
I won’t pretend to know the answers. In my opinion, when we get in on a mistake fare successfully, it is a bonus, and I never feel entitled to a company honoring a mistake fare.
I know others have different and sometimes strong opinions.
Why do you think United added this new language to its award chart?
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I believe they added this, in part, to be able to unilaterally cancel tickets that take advantage of free or discounted one-ways. When I flew LAX-MRS//BRU-LAX/LAX-SCL last year and saved 10k miles on the LAX-SCL leg, every single phone agent told me something had gone wrong with the pricing. I even had one “supervisor” dress me down and tell me I would be unable to make any more changes to the itin because it was obviously a mistake fare and I was cheating the system.
I shudder to think of what would’ve happened if they had the “right” to unilaterally nuke my award.
I hope that’s not the case. Your award didn’t violate the letter or spirit of any published rules.
I guess they’ve been catching up on reading some of the posts on “someone else’s” site where it’s been promoted to try and get the agent (especially US) to book an itinerary which Ben knew was stretching it, and if the agent priced it and ticketed it, then all was fine. So I guess they’re catching on. But for an airline to arbitrarily cancel a ticketed itinerary lacking any merit is not a good thing. I can see the 4 cent itineraries being cancelled, but for a minor pricing error on a legit routing, be it their software or an agent error, to cause a cancellation without even so much as a phone call to advise – that’s wrong. But the government always backs their friends and screws the little guy.
We’ll see. DOT has mainly backed flyers on cash mistake fares–even pretty outrageous ones.
Lawyers are going to lawyer and Smisek needs to find his $2B in cost savings somewhere.
Of course, a family having their dream vacation to Europe cancelled because United saw they had a 5k mile error in their favor makes for great news coverage.