Or maybe you’ll get a refund if you throw a tantrum but not if you ask nicely. But perhaps you’ll be out of luck if the airline cancels your nonstop, and puts you on a one-stop landing six hours later than the flight you bought. Maybe you’ll get one if United cancels your flight and delays you for 24 hours. It means the airline can make a case-by-case decision about whether you’re due a refund. Now you’re most likely to get a refund, if “the scheduled departure or arrival time significantly changes.” The 25-hour restriction is gone, replaced not by a new number, but by the most vague information you can imagine. United told me late Tuesday that it made another change to the website language.
On Tuesday, Brett, a former airline employee who is normally sympathetic to the industry, gave United his Jackass award, a rare distinction bestowed only on the worst offenders.
You may not know Brett, but he has an outsize following among airline executives. So did Brett Snyder, who blogs as Cranky Flier. I blogged and tweeted about the policy, and some frequent flyers complained about it online. Usually, advanced schedule changes are rare, but they’re becoming more common since United plans to cancel at least 20 percent of flights this spring as travelers avoid airplanes. Under its old language, it protected people who had booked a flight on, say, Tuesday evening, only to learn they couldn’t fly until Wednesday afternoon. But it still was a policy, clearly listed on United’s website. On Saturday, the language changed, from two hours to 25, regardless of whether you bought your ticket before or after the website update.Ī United spokeswoman said the airline had the right, since the two-hour rule never appeared in the contract of carriage, the multi-page legal document governing airfares that no one reads. If you bought a ticket before Saturday, March 7 - and thought to look at United’s website - you would have seen a policy that allowed you to receive a refund in most cases if the airline changed your flight by two hours or more, without your permission. The policy change covered when passengers could get a refund after the airline messed up their plans.
It’s a question some frequent flyers and I asked over the weekend in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, after a source pointed me to a change United Airlines made on its website. ORIGINAL STORY: Should you trust a business that changes its guidelines on refunds after you buy? “The relatively small percentage of customers who are delayed by more than 2 hours, but less than 6 hours, are eligible to cancel and retain the value of their ticket for future use, and in the case of special circumstances can work with our customer contact center to find a resolution,” a United spokeswoman said. Now, passengers can receive a refund if United cancels their flight and rebooks them more than six hours earlier or earlier. UPDATE: A day after this story was published, United Airlines changed its refund policy for a third time in one week.
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