Turning a United Partner Schedule Change into a Schedule Improvement
Schedule changes are unavoidable. Sometimes you have the perfect flights and a flight cancellation ruins your itinerary. You have to work with the airline for a reasonable itinerary and I know many instances where a partner flight cancelation made a trip nearly impossible. However, sometimes a partner schedule change opens up a good opportunity to renegotiate a better schedule.
Samba for Miles and I are meeting up in Vienna in July toward the end of my Europe trip with my family to visit the Czech Republic and Austria. She booked a round-trip award on United stopping in multiple cities. While her flights to Vienna weren’t perfect, they were at least workable. Her schedule was to leave Los Angeles on Air Canada at 2 pm for Vancouver, connect to an Air Canada flight to London and eventually arrive in Vienna in the afternoon the next day. 2 pm was pretty much the earliest she could leave to at least have a half day at work and stay until 12 pm. A schedule change came when Air Canada moved the Vancouver flight to 1:30 pm, meaning she’d have to leave work before 12.
Reworking The Flight Schedule
For a partner schedule change, the ticket issuing airline will generally work with you to accommodate you. It will let you change your award flights to different award flights and frequently waive change fees. However, there is an often overlooked option that really helps improve things in a situation like this. Airlines actually have quite a bit of leeway in these situations. A manager is able to open up award availability on its own flights provided there are seats available. There doesn’t need to be award availability to begin with – the manager can simply override and open up a seat for your award itinerary. However, this is done as a courtesy to help you out, so I find it’s best to ask for it nicely (though everyone has his own approach, I suppose).
In Svetlana’s case, she found there was a non-stop flight from Los Angeles to London on United at 5:45 pm that day. It was an absolutely ideal flight for her trip. Unfortunately, there was no award availability. She called United and explained that the schedule change made it very difficult for her to travel as she’d have to leave work even earlier than expected. The customer service agent spoke to her manager and was able to give Svetlana the 5:45 pm flight, even though there was no Saver award availability. Leaving later, removing a connection and landing in Vienna at the same time, was a very welcome change for Svetlana.
At this point, I’ve had many schedule changes on United partners and am generally able to have a manager open up award availability. The same is true of US Airways. I certainly haven’t tried with every airline, but it’s definitely worth asking. So next time you have a scheduling change that worsens your itinerary, you should see if you can find a flight on the ticket issuing airline that works for you.
Does United notify you faithfully when there’s a change? Several times I’ve only learned about it only when I took the initiative myself to review my itinerary. Then I might find a misconnect, a flight a full day earlier or later, or even a leg canceled without being notified. Yes, when I’ve called they’ve worked with me, but it’s very disconcerting not to be able to trust that a reservation will “hold still” or that I’ll be notified by email if it doesn’t.
I had similar experience but with an injury needed to come home early. Especially using a foreign call center. They would give me any flight I wanted as long as it was United metal. I think this is more than courtesy though. They save money by putting you on a flight of their own metal that won’t fill up anyway over paying a partner.
I’m a little confused when you say ticket issuing airline. Say for example, you use United miles to book a flight on Lufthansa. Does this mean call United or Lufthansa? And would you try to get the CSR to open up an award seat on United or Lufthansa in this scenario? Appreciate any clarification you can give on this!
If you’re using United miles, then United is the ticketing airline as they’re the ones who issue your ticket. If any schedule changes or problems, you need to call United. They may try to work with the partner availability for a better schedule and they have the power to open up seats on their own carriers. Either way, United is completely responsible for your ticket and no other airline will touch it. :)
Thanks for all the answers MP. I’ve been a lot more focused on the earning side, I’m now transitioning into burning all these miles and need a couple pointers :) My accounts are flush enough that I may just enter MS retirement, at least for a little while haha
BTW, if you ever need some help navigating the landmines out in Long Island, or finding the friendlys, lemme know! I was that guy outside the conference room in Charlotte making awkward conversation about New York.
It was nice to meet you in Charlotte! And on MS retirement… you can always get a cash back card, preferably 5% :)
Wow, it’s called reading retention! The answers are right there in your post!
I gave it a second read and figured it out. Thanks for the great post.