Last month a Chase Ultimate Rewards member transferred their points to United, in order to book an award that showed as available at United.com, but wasn’t really available. United wouldn’t send his points back to Chase, and he complained to the Department of Transportation that this was an unfair and deceptive practice.
- They needed 193,000 more miles than they had in their account. United’s website suggested they buy the miles. They transferred the points in from Chase Ultimate Rewards instead.
- The award space for business class travel on EVA Air from Chicago to Singapore via Taipei turned out to be phantom and unbookable. The website errored out after they transferred the points.
- While the space still showed up online, a phone agent said the space wasn’t available and also that they couldn’t send their points back. Those were now stuck at United, instead of back at Chase where they could be transferred somewhere else that there was available award space to book the trip.
United offered a ticket for sale on its website. It tried to sell the customer miles to purchase the ticket. The airline got paid for the points transferred in (by Chase). They couldn’t sell the ticket, but wanted to keep the money they’d gotten even though they have the ability to send the points back.
Now United’s responses are available on the DOT’s regulatory docket.
- United blames a “Google coding issue” that prevented them from booking EVA Air flights for 17 days. During that time they did not inform customers of the issue and continued to advertise EVA Air availability.
- The airline says this is no big deal because over a 7 month period, “only 0.11 percent of the searches for flights on united.com resulted in a customer receiving an error message.” That doesn’t deny they were unfairly harming consumers, and given United.com volumes of over 50 million visits per month (and therefore over 350 million during the covered period) 1/9th of 1% is still quite significant. Not every visit entails a flight search, but some entail several, so assuming these offset we’re talking about roughly 400,000 errors.
- United says that they disclose on their website “that award levels on partner airlines may not be available to consumers” and thus, they argue, they should have no liability for showing what’s available and the price, inducing a customer to transfer their points, and then (1) not allowing the customer to make the booking, and (2) not allowing the customer to reverse the mileage transfer. This is absurd.
Nonetheless, United doesn’t actually want DOT to evaluate these arguments. It’s just handwaving so they can say they weren’t engaging in an unfair and deceptive practice. They went ahead and refunded the customer’s points transfer back to Chase, arguing that they’ve been made whole and therefore that should be the end of the matter.
In the process, they disclose that “[i]n the last six months of 2023, United reversed approximately 50 Chase Ultimate Rewards transactions each month, many on the basis of goodwill.”
Historically DOT has improperly ignored complaints about frequent flyer programs, according to their own Inspector General, even though DOT is a consumer’s only avenue of redress most of the time since the Supreme Court limited a program member’s ability to sue for breaches of good faith and lack of fair dealing.
No customer should have to go to DOT to get what they’re clearly owed when the airline made a mistake. They’ve gone through that now. Fortunately United has also “provided United Mileage Plus Program miles to Complainant as a measure of goodwill” for the effort they had to go through to get what was clearly due to them.
United: “Yes, we poked you in the eye. As a gesture of goodwill, we’ll now remove our finger from your eye. You’re welcome.”
Putting aside United’s culpability here, it would be really customer-friendly, and probably not that hard for them to allow customers to put an award ticket on hold as many of their Star Alliance partners do including Singapore, Turkish, and Lufthansa. This would completely solve the problem since you wouldn’t have to transfer unless the hold took, although I guess it still has to ticket and there could be a problem at that point.
Get over it and move along. Phantom bookings are a known problem with certain airlines (EVA Air being one of them). To first of all hold UA responsible for what a foreign carrier’s system may send as available space would never stand up in court. Secondly, there are practical ways to verify if such space is available. This person got lazy and should suffer the consequences. Now if UA had sold them miles they would, IMHO, have a stronger case. As it stands they have Chase points moved to UA and can likely get reasonable value by booking a UA Polaris ticket somewhere. Outside of UA’s lack of control over EVA AIr systems and the plaintiff’s lack of reasonable due diligence there would be a legal argument that they haven’t suffered harm since they still have the UA points.
Won’t go very far unless our liberal, anti-business government wants to press the issue but UA would likely prevail on an appeal.
AC: you’re deranged. Politically and practically.
Eva is too hard to book except with their own miles.
Phantom availability of reward tickets is akin to a carnival game in which it is literally impossible to win the big prize. The only difference is that the carney is a massive global industry that got public funding so they didn’t go out of business during the pandemic…unlike the restaurant in my neighborhood that is still empty.
This happens to United.com site all the time. Customers saw something amazing, considering how hard it is to get an award seat these days, and tried to claim that award seat. Clicking and clicking to the last step to enter credit card number and bam, the message ‘please call UA customer service’ displays. Calling UA agents first to confirm the award is available is a must. Warning – agents will treat you as if you are bothering them when asking them to check for award space.
Had the same thing happen with Lifemiles and Ethiopian space (the space WAS available but Lifemile’s IT wouldn’t let them book any awards from this airline even while they continued to display its award space when they knew about the problem!)
Yea, good luck getting those miles reversed!
Anyone who trusts any IT system is baying at the moon .
Anyone who trusts DEI companies with anything is also baying at the moon .
Anyone who trusts Brandon’s complaint department with their complaint is also baying at the moon .
Under retail law UA is liable for false advertising and any decent business would have charge back privileges against the listed carrier IF they ever want to post their goods as available on their platform.
Airlines have played my dog ate my homework for years. It’s time they took ownership of their crappy IT and weeks long responses from their customer service.
cut-cut and cut some more and pretty soon you have NO customers to abuse.
>No customer should have to go to DOT to get what they’re clearly owed when the airline made a mistake.
United stole from Lifetime United Club members who paid cash for unlimited access to United Clubs. Is the DOT now able to address that theft? AA and DL restored access to their lifetime members without being forced to.
@ AC — Seriously? The vast majority of customers have no idea how to do any of those things. Even if they did, why should they have to do them?
Just wait until Chase decides that they don’t like you anymore and cancels all of your credit cards, bank accounts and brokerage accounts with them (Chase sometimes does this, look up people complaining about it online). I wonder if your mileage or points will stay unaffected.
Where does SCOTUS get off limiting customers’ ability to sue when airlines do them wrong?
@JKT – that’s the Court’s interpretation of what Congress wrote in the Airline Deregulation Act.
* States don’t get to regulate airline schedules and pricing
* Frequent flyer programs are rebates (pricing)
* Common law claims over duties of good faith and fair dealing are state-level contract claims
Just had this happen with Air France/Flying Blue. Except that all segments were on Air France/KLM so no partner airlines involved. Flights were still being advertised over 24 hours later on their website. Agent said it frequently “takes a few days” for changes in award ticket status to show up.
And yes, I filed a complaint with the Department of Transportation for deceptive practices.
Well if Eva has known problems, then UA should take the matter up with Eva rather than just telling the customer too bad. Blaming the computer is classic. Is UA required to reimburse the DOT for their time spent dealing with the issue or is it the US taxpayer footing the bill for the DOT staff time?
AC, Paul, Gary, Aaron, lots of people make points, some being good points.
The airline deregulation act was a gift of mana from heaven to the airlines. They can now amend contracts after signature and without penalty and prior to delivery of good and services. For the most part they can’t be held liable in civil suits. They get to keep the spoils of their ill-gotten gains, a tort of conversion, for which the aggrieved party is not allowed to sue.
Imagine if this happened at WalMart. You find an online sale, they debit your credit card, and then refuse to deliver the product indicating that it was an IT problem with the manufacturer, supplier, warehouse inventory guy, etc. You ask for a refund to your card and they say no.
In such a case you could charge back the amount, but in the airlines case you cant. It’s legal, but it’s certainly not “right”, “just”, or “fair”.
Lobby your congress-critter. I’m sure they’ll resolve it right after Tik Tok.
Well, let’s see. Transfer Ultimate Rewards in from Chase to United to book a partner award. What could go wrong? Get real, don’t do stuff like this. While United could easily fix this kind of thing, there’s no profit to be had, so why would they? A seasoned points & miles junkie books simple things that go through. “Partners and code-shares” are just marketing concepts to appease us.
Why spend your time diddling around with something that might not work, and if it doesn’t work, there’s nothing you can do about it.
Great writing & exposition Gary. TY
Way too easy to blame United.
An award ticket on Eva?? Come on. That’s a joke and you want United to win problems at Eva? The passenger didn’t have enough miles on one airline and strung together miles from 3 separate entities. What could go wrong. You gambled one lost. You were destined for trouble with this game.
@hueyjudy That’s pretty much the point of UR points for lots of people.. I’ve done it successfully dozens of times.
The interesting thing to me is that UA admitted they could send the miles back at the push of a button and sometimes do. Sounds like you just need to be the squeaky wheel.
Admittedly this was pre-COVID, around 2018 I think, but I successfully booked 2 business class flights outbound from Chicago O’Hare on Turkish to Vietnam and return from Bangkok to O’Hare on EVA (positioned ourselves in Bangkok on separate paid booking with an Asian airline). Booked the B-class tix through United using existing miles plus a transfer from Chase to make up what I was missing. No issues. Guess I should have bought a lottery ticket that week since I had no idea how lucky I was. Both flights were great, EVA Hello Kitty flight was, in fact, amazing. It was my first big United redemption and first Chase transfer as well. Fate sometimes looks after the innocent, I guess. In the future, though, I’ll treat them like assassins are lurking around every corner:).
Happened to me. Transferred 220,000 Chase UR points to UA based on them showing 2 tickets available. Came to find out they weren’t. Interesting that the article writes UA claims they reversed 50%. I’ve called numerous times, only to be told those point reversals were impossible. I guess they lied to me?
Can I use the same argument United does? Maybe I fly them without paying, and explain that this represents 0.00001 of their revenue for the month, and therefore the court should simply ignore the fraud I knowingly perpetrated?
Enough subsidizing these dishonest bastards.
Enough sheltering them from foreign competition.
Allow all commercially viable airlines compete freely in the US, but and own airlines, or well keep suffering these jerks robbing us blind, then laughing in our faces