Tag Archives for change fees.
American Airlines is building is schedule back up domestically for July, re-opening Admirals Clubs, and improving its change fee waiver – while re-asserting one element of restrictions attached to its basic economy fares.
Update: American’s new award change and reinstatement fees have been pushed off from June 1 to July 1. That’s an extra month where you can take advantage of waived change fees, booking before the potential for big new costs go into effect.
American Airlines is extending its change fee waiver for tickets purchased in June – but only for itineraries to travel by end of September.
American seems to be saying that the lull in travel, while to some extent long lasting, is likely to bounce back. That’s at least true for leisure travel, since business travel wouldn’t be booking past September anyway. At a minimum there’s some chance that they won’t need to offer flexibility indefinitely into the future, so they’d rather offer this a little bit at a time. That makes sense, from a certain point of view.
Customers whose events are cancelling are getting travel credits, often without change fees, from major airlines. While hotels are waiving cancellation penalties and refunding non-refundable bookings, airlines are not.
For a leisure traveler perhaps they’ll use a travel credit for another trip in the future. In most cases they’ve got 12 months from original date of purchase (not date of the trip) to use the credit. For managed business travelers their company may be paying for the booking directly, and is on the hook for trips not taken. But what about unmanaged business travelers who submit receipts for reimbursement after a trip?
There’s little benefit to cancelling a trip now that you aren’t going to take versus waiting until much closer to scheduled departure to do it, and there’s an upside to waiting. You may be able to get a refund later that you cannot today.
United has slightly walked back its crazy policy published this weekend not to provide refunds to customers in the event of a schedule change less than 25 hours.
After a swift backlash in social media, United will now let customers cancel and retain a travel credit without a change fee in the event United changes flight schedules 2 or more hours. They’re still applying new rules retroactively to already-purchased tickets.
We’re well past where it makes sense to offer flexibility only to new ticket purchases. Qatar is not only extending their flexible change policy to existing, already-purchased tickets they’re providing the option to take a travel voucher good for a year from date of issue – customers aren’t limited to traveling within a year of their original ticket purchase.
American Airlines has come out with their own convoluted copycat of waiving change fees on new ticket purchases. It is simultaneously less generous and also more strategically useful than what JetBlue and Alaska have done in the face of weak bookings resulting from coronavirus fears.
Delta has been talking about reducing or eliminating change fees, or providing additional value when they charge fees.
Currently the standard ticket change fee on Delta is $200, which is similar to what American and United charge. However they’ve been talking about changing that.
Amtrak doesn’t have enough passengers. On many of their routes trains ride mostly empty. They have a cost problem and they have a ridership problem. The government train operator is addressing the cost of meals, Amtrak has lost nine figures on food service, but doing surprisingly (or not so surprisingly) little to address labor costs.
However they seem to see their ridership problem as a lack of revenue problem and they’er looking to generate more money out of each passenger rather than boost the number of passengers.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
