Questions and Answers

All –

Looking for some group think here to help me resolve.

We had an award ticket from IAH – FRA consisting of a IAH-DFW segment in economy and a DFW-FRA segment in LH first. Due to several UA maintenance issues, we were unable to get to Dallas before the afternoon flight and the next best option seemed IAH-FRA direct in LH biz.

That said, the IAH-FRA flight in LH was [I]selling [/I]first seats, but of course United could not see them in award inventory and thus was unable to book us onto them. Folks at the check in desk, the UC, and on the phone were no help, all saying their hands were tied by inventory availability.

Two questions:
1. Anything we could have done differently to get on the IAH-FRA flight in F?
2. Is compensation typically given in situations like this? We are having trouble even getting the miles refunded, and I hate to be that guy asking for something, but gosh if we weren’t looking forward to F and the FCT.

I think that for a maintenance issue, it doesnt matter that it was an award ticket. They should have been able to put you on that direct flight since seats were available for sale.

Not sure about compensation but at minimum, UA has to refund the difference in miles (40k per passenger) to you. Push for that and maybe ask for extra because of the trouble you went thru.

Agree with [USER=29]@David W[/USER], you should get the difference in miles back at the very least and award inventory shouldn’t have been as much of an issue in IRROPs. On a related note though, you wouldn’t have been able to access the FCT as an arriving passenger with your trip terminating in FRA.

Re the FCT, we had an onward ticket in business later that day on a separate reservation.

Appreciate the thoughts. As of now they have refunded the 40k miles difference for 1 of the 2 reservations automatically. We’ll call them after our trip is over the get the rest.