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US Airways and American Airlines have merged since the publication of this post so it is no longer valid.
I received an email from Award Wallet saying a US Airways award I had booked had a schedule change. Nine months ago I booked an economy award from LAX to Richmond roundtrip with US Airways miles over Thanksgiving weekend.
The change to my award was minor, one flight was leaving thirty minutes earlier, but it made another itinerary slightly shorter. I decided to test whether US Airways would let me switch my award flight to the shorter itinerary.
Both my booked itinerary and the one I wanted to change to were flights operated by United.
The new itinerary I wanted did not have any low-level award space according to united.com. That meant it would not ordinarily be bookable with US Airways miles.
But I wanted to see what was possible.
I called US Airways at 800-428-4322 to make the change. I explained that my award’s schedule had been changed, and “the new times don’t work for me.”
The agent was understanding and said she’d search to see what was available for me to change to. She reported there was nothing I could change to that day.
I asked her to search for the exact United flights I wanted, and she said no seat was available.
I complained that the schedule change had negatively impacted me, so I should be able to change for free to a different flight. She sympathized but said she couldn’t get me a seat on the United flights I wanted.
She offered me a full refund of the miles, taxes, and fees I had originally paid. She said the refund would have to be a total refund, and I would have to cancel both the outbound and return. This fits with the fact that US Airways awards have to be booked as roundtrips and not oneways.
I declined and hung up. I knew that it was a longshot that US Airways would be able to change my award to United flights that did not have saver availability. I wanted to test whether I could change to any US Airways flights I wanted.
I repeated my process of calling to complain about the schedule change. The agent was again sympathetic, but she said she couldn’t find any other flights to change me to that day. I inquired about a specific LAX to Richmond routing through Charlotte.
She informed me that I couldn’t change to that routing because it was at the medium 40k miles price instead of the low 25k price of my award.
I stepped up my insistence. I said, “I know there are seats available for purchase on the flights I want. Because of the schedule change imposed on me by US Airways, I would like to switch to a schedule that works for me.”
She put me on hold and went to a supervisor. She came back with the bad news that she couldn’t change my flight since my desired itinerary did not have low-level availability.
She made me the same offer of a free cancellation, which I declined.
Recap
Even minor changes can allow you to make a free change or cancellation of an existing US Airways award. If you want to make the change, though, you need to change to a flight that has the same level availability as your original award.
Unless you can sweet talk better than I can, US Airways is pretty firm in their change requirements.
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Just curious. Do you think at some point you get a reputation with a company for making too many rather demanding calls over small changes? I know brick and mortar businesses tend to develop an informal list of “these are customers that will really waste our time”. I’m just wondering if airline award agents have a way to note that kind of thing in a record, and whether it’s best strategy to draw attention to onesself as a frequently complaining customer when it isn’t really a major change and you really could live with it OK. I realize in this instance you’re partly testing the system to have a report to make in the blog.
I have 2 paid tickets on Alaska that I’m trying to get out of. They recently changed the departure time to 6 min later and on the return trip, arrive 15 minutes later. Called up CSR and they would not change (saying something about they can’t control flight times). Didn’t escalate to supervisor. Any tips?
And it can be even worse once travel commences on a US Airways award, since it is not possible to make any changes of any kind for any reason. Last year I had a first class award to HKG on Lufthansa and Thai, with a return to the US via IST on Turkish. My flight on TK had an equipment change, that meant I was forced to fly business, since it was on a plane with no first class cabin. I found out about the equipment change only a couple of days beforehand and called US Airways from HKG, they were unsympathetic to say the least. This was the longest flight (12 hrs) of my entire trip and I had been looking forward to my first class experience on TK, needless to say. Only after repeated requests (from the concierge service that I used for this trip) to US Airways, did I get any compensation. I was refunded 5,000 miles, on what had been a 160,000 mile award.
Sorry to hear it.
[…] In January, I booked an award flight to the east coast on United-operated flights with US Airways miles for Thanksgiving weekend. That flight has been changed twice, and I blogged about my experience trying to change the flights after United changed them on me. See Award Change Negotiations with US Airways. […]