A contemplative post for you. Basically, I want to see if you think I’m being slightly paranoid. I have a big award trip booked for this fall. Currently, my itinerary is as follows:
- United First Class, Washington Dulles (IAD) to Rome (FCO.
- Some trains, some wine.
- 14 night cruise aboard the soon to debut Celebrity Reflection, Venice to Barcelona.
- Lufthansa Business, Barcelona – Frankfurt – Washington Dulles (IAD).
You can see the issue here with my recent relocation announcement. I am absolutely petrified of calling United right now to ask them to do anything with any of these itineraries given all of their IT issues of late. I just don’t have any confidence that they will get it right. Am I a little crazy for considering the purchase of revenue tickets between Atlanta and Dulles for this? I’d love to hear from you. Especially, if you’ve had recent experience with changing award travel with United.
[…] for a few days in NC with my mother and then travel on to Georgia on Labor Day. I had fretted previously about my sense of trepidation in giving United a call to update our award itineraries for our […]
I called to change an award ticket last week. Simple change but the first words out of the agent was “Oh My”.
Luckily, he did it without a problem, even gave me a flight with no saver award avail. (There was double miles award availability…)
Without any experience on the subject, I had a thought on another option.
An an option (and know that I’m a “newbie” at all of the FF travel and ways to maximize award tickets), is it possible to add a flight to ATL at the end of your award ticket (using IAD as a stopover)? Then you would only need to buy one ticket ATL to IAD at the beginning of your trip.
It is possible assuming there’s availability. There is availability for my return flight…haven’t checked the outbound. I was more concerned about UA’s well publicized IT issues than anything else, but it appears from the comments that my fears are unfounded.
Yup, you’re too paranoid. I understand your fear–I have the same fear every time I make a change to an award that I have that has SQ F, which is irreplaceable. However, the United agents have never made a mistake in which they haven’t made it right. And even then, they’ve only rarely made mistakes. Just be very clear exactly what you want them to do and it will be fine. Where you potentially might run into problems is if you’re ambiguous. Don’t try to tell them the big picture story, just say remove LH123 on 5 Apr IAD-MUC, add… Read more »
Based on my personal sample of two, yes, you’re being paranoid.
On June 28, I called UA and changed the departure of outbound flights from June 30 to June 29. It was a mixed airlines itinerary where I changed both the airlines and routing.
On July 15 while abroad I called and changed my return flights for that same day. I changed the airlines, routing as well as class of service, and my new flight departed less than 2 hours from wen I called.
Thanks for the comments everyone.
Don’t sweat it. Call them up and talk it through with no expectations. Worse case is it costs you a little cash and time to get to and from DC. United may find it refreshing to deal with a customer who has no expectations given what they have been through with customers expecting to fly to the far east for 4 miles. Also, since you won’t be getting to stay in those nice Atlanta hotels anymore this could be an opportunity to get a couple of nights in a nice DC hotel (that I’m guessing you haven’t been doing given… Read more »
Why don’t you wait for the next time you’re in a United lounge and ask them to do it there?
I don’t see an issue changing this, adding the Atlanta segment on either end. I made some (slightly simpler) changes in May and it was fine, did it all online, the only glitch was seat assignments kept getting lost but a call to reservations solved it. The bigger question is going to be, is it worth paying the change fee? Could be $150/person/itinerary unless you have status. Paying it on the outbound means you are not traveling on 2 separate tickets and the airline is responsible for a misconnect. On the return, I would only pay it if I got… Read more »
Did a similar thing during the Aeroplan promotion in December. Was staffed locally in Toronto then and was scheduled to end that engagement around the end of April. Not knowing where I would be staffed next, I booked my reward flights out of JFK, figuring that would be an easy “flex” from anywhere I could be staffed in. As such things in life, got extended on my current project and by then Aeroplan wanted the extra 30k miles to add in the YYZ-JFK segments so I ended up buying revenue tickets to LGA. Since AE charges you taxes, I basically… Read more »
I am interpreted in this as well given a dangerously short 1.5 hour connection between UA Domestic F and SQ F in SFO. I’d like I move the UA leg to the night before but have no confidence in UA agents.