Adventures with Etihad Guest: “Fixing” and cancelling JetBlue awards

One of the things that is great about pursuing something like JetBlue’s 25 for 25 promotion is that it gives you an opportunity to do all sorts of crazy things that you’d never have otherwise done, like book an award ticket through Etihad Guest. In turn, it gives you a chance to test out getting a problem with an Etihad booking fixed and cancelling an award booked via Etihad Guest, which in turn gives you a chance to be pleasantly surprised and decide that this program isn’t necessarily one to put on “ignore” after all.

“Fixing” an award with the Etihad birthday problem

I’ve previously written about the challenges of booking a JetBlue award ticket with Etihad Guest (See: Booking JetBlue via Etihad: An exercise in frustration, but great when it works). A number of readers have reported an inability to check in online for their Etihad-booked JetBlue flights, with several noting it being due to a problem with Etihad’s transmission of birth dates. I have a guess about a potential root cause of the issue, but I’ll come back to that after explaining the core problem we had and how we fixed it.

I made two reservations via Etihad Guest for JetBlue flights that we flew last week. I noticed when reviewing my reservation information for both bookings in the JetBlue app that the reservations were missing any birth date information for me and also for my wife. Oddly, our kids were listed with the correct birth dates, but in the passenger information for the two adults on the reservation, it said “Birth Date: None”.

The first of the two itineraries was from Nantucket (ACK) to New York-LaGuardia (LGA). That was the second part of a quick turn: We were flying from Boston to Nantucket, scheduled to land at 10:30am and then take off for the ACK-LGA leg at 11:15am. These were separate bookings: we had booked Boston to Nantucket via JetBlue and Nantucket to New York via Etihad Guest.

I was able to check in online for the Boston-to-Nantucket reservation (which we made via JetBlue). However, when I tried to check in online for Nantucket to New York, I got an error in the JetBlue app saying that the trip wasn’t eligible for online check-in.

We arrived at Boston Logan Airport early in the morning and went to the Mosaic check-in desk. I explained to the agent that we already had our boarding passes for Boston-to-Nantucket, but that we couldn’t check in online for Nantucket-to-New York. She initially told me it was because we had to check in at the Nantucket airport, but I explained to her the tight timeframe and that there wouldn’t be time to do that. She looked at the reservations again and must have realized that the birth dates were missing. She took our IDs, presumably entered the birth dates, and was able to check us in and print boarding passes for the Nantucket-to-New York flight at the Boston check-in station. I then also had the boarding passes within the JetBlue app.

Later in the week, I had another Etihad Guest-booked reservation to fly JetBlue from Boston to Milwaukee. Just like the previous reservation, it was listing “None” as the “Birth Date” for both my wife and me. I figured I was going to have to resolve this at the check-in desk in Boston, but as I was relaying this story to Greg, he suggested that I try chatting with JetBlue or Etihad to see if someone could fix it before online check-in began.

I predicted that this would be completely futile. I would contact JetBlue and they would tell me to contact Etihad. Etihad would tell me that it was all JetBlue’s fault. I thought for sure I’d get nowhere.

Still, for the sake of science, I followed Greg’s suggestion. JetBlue has a page for chat support. I decided to chat via WhatsApp so that I could start the process on my computer and switch to my phone if it took too long and I needed to leave my computer.

Much to my pleasant surprise, it only took a couple of minutes to reach an agent. I explained the situation, including the confirmation number and passenger names.

I next provided our birth dates. Within 5 minutes, the agent confirmed that we were all set.

Sure enough, when online check-in opened for the flight, I was able to check in and retrieve boarding passes without any further issues!

Moral of the story: if your Etihad-booked JetBlue award (or any other award) is missing the birth date information, it is worth trying to chat with support.

My theory on the root cause here is that the Etihad system has a bigger birthday problem.

The short story is that my profile lists what appears to be my correct birthday. It is worth mentioning that I created my Etihad account more than a decade ago. My birth date is listed correctly if we’re writing birthdays as we do in the United States: MM-DD-YYYY.

However, most of the rest of the world writes birthdays in a different order: DD-MM-YYYY (starting with the smallest unit, days, and increasing in unit size to months and then years).

When I recently reset my Etihad password, I was getting an error saying that they were unable to validate my information. I eventually realized that the system was reversing my date of birth.

In other words, imagine that my birthday was February 9th, 1975. I was choosing “Feb” for the month, then the 9th day of the month and the year 1975, but Etihad was then converting that in numerical format as 09-02-1975 (while we in the United States would think of that set of numbers as representing September 2nd, Etihad was turning my February 9th birthday into DD-MM-YYYY format). Even though I was selecting “Feb”, the system was writing it numerically “backwards” and as such it wasn’t matching my profile information (which was written as 02-09-1975 — I suppose that I probably entered that numerically a decade ago rather than by selecting a month and day on a calendar). When I realized what was happening, I selected “Sep” for the month and “2” for the day, and the system reversed that numerically to enter 02-09-1975. Boom! It let me reset my password by choosing the wrong birthday (How Etihad of them is that?!?). My guess is that this must be related to the issue with transmitting birthdays to JetBlue. Note that my birth date isn’t really 2/9/1975 or 9/2/1975, I’m just making that example up to illustrate the issue.

Whether that is the root cause of the issue or not, the solution was simple: chat with JetBlue to get it done.

Etihad Guest’s punitive-looking cancellation policy

In the first paragraph of this post, I mentioned that I’d ordinarily never consider booking an award via Etihad Guest. Etihad has made waves in recent years by having what I (and many others) have described as the second most punitive award cancellation policy in the industry (behind only Iberia, which treats most partner awards as totally nonrefundable).

Here’s a look at the Etihad Guest award cancellation fee schedule.

As you can see above, the cancellation penalties are brutal. If you cancel your award ticket more than 21 days in advance, you lose 25% of your miles in most cases. If you cancel between 8 and 21 days in advance, you lose 50%. Between 1 and 7 days, the penalty is 75% of what you paid for the ticket! That’s awful. Within 24 hours, the award is nonrefundable. I should note that JetBlue-operated awards are listed as “Value” awards.

For that reason, I’ve avoided Etihad like the plague. I can’t imagine booking an expensive award only to have one of my kids get sick the week of departure and face the prospect of losing 75% of the miles we’d used to book. No thanks!

I’d sworn off booking awards via Etihad Guest except in situations very close to departure where I was certain that plans wouldn’t change.

While I think that is a sound general approach, my recent experience with an Etihad cancellation makes me realize that I may have been painting the program with too broad a brush.

My experience cancelling a JetBlue-operated Etihad Guest award ticket

I originally booked my family of four on a JetBlue flight from Nantucket (ACK) to New York-LaGuardia (LGA) on August 15th. I paid 6,030 miles and $18.79 per passenger.

Unfortunately, we ultimately had to be somewhere else on August 15th for a funeral, so we had to bump up the Nantucket-to-New York segment by a few days (to August 12th).

I tried to make the change online and pay the change fee, but I kept getting an error when trying to do that. I then tried to cancel the August 15th booking online and the system gave me an error saying that I would have to call Etihad to cancel.

Rather than waste time with that in the moment when plans were changing, I just made a new and completely separate booking to fly Nantucket-to-New York on August 12th. I later called separately to cancel the August 15th booking.

I dragged my feet on making the phone call to cancel the August 15th booking until it was 7 days and about 10 minutes prior to departure. I was technically still ahead of the 1-7 day cancellation window when an agent answered 5 minutes later. That agent reviewed the information and within a minute of being exactly 7 days in advance of departure, they quoted me the 50% cancellation penalty and I confirmed that I wanted to cancel. A minute later, the phone agent confirmed that the ticket was cancelled, but they said that a different department handled the mileage refund and that I should expect an email from them in a few days confirming the mileage refund.

I didn’t love the sound of that because I wasn’t sure whether I would ultimately be subject to a 50% mileage penalty (what I expected to be a penalty of about 3,000 miles per passenger) based on the moment when I requested cancellation or a 75% penalty (a penalty of about 4,500 miles per passenger) based on when the refund was processed. In other words, I figured that I would get a refund of either about 3,000 miles per passenger or 1,500 miles per passenger, depending on which penalty applied. Rather than push for further confirmation on the phone, I decided that I’d see what happened.

Yesterday, I finally saw what happened.

As you can see above, I received a refund of 5,100 miles per passenger — more than I had expected based on either scenario.

If Etihad kept things simple, that would mean that the penalty was 930 miles per passenger (remember that I had paid 6,030 miles per passenger). However, that didn’t really make sense since 930 miles would only be a cancellation penalty of about 15.42%. That doesn’t fit with anything in the cancellation chart. And, unfortunately, things aren’t quite so simple.

I remembered that in our post about Etihad’s award cancellation updates last month, Tim had pointed to an Award Wallet explanation of Etihad’s cancellation policy that paints a much more confusing picture of Etihad’s cancellation penalties. I think they are probably on to something, but the math doesn’t line up here.

Award Wallet points out that, according to the fine print underneath the percentages, the penalties in the chart above are a percentage of the fare. What is “the fare” on an award ticket?

I would have assumed that the “fare” on an award ticket is the mileage cost. I would have thought of the cash component as “taxes & fees”. However, Award Wallet suggests that Etihad calculates the “fare” differently. Here’s what they say:

1. Etihad takes the mileage cost of the ticket (in my case, 6,030) and multiples it times a value of $0.02 per mile (in my case, $120.60).
2. Etihad then adds any taxes & fees paid (in my case, $18.79) and adds it to the “cash value” of the miles from #1 (in my case, $120.60 + $18.79) to get a total “fare” (in my case, that would be $139.39 per passenger).
3. The penalty is then calculated as a percentage of that total cash cost from #2 above (in my case $139.39 * 50% = $69.70).
4. The penalty is taken first from the taxes & fees paid and then from the rest of the cash value from above. The remaining “cash value” is converted back to miles at a ratio of $0.02 to 1 mile. In my case, the penalty would be $69.70. They would keep the $18.79 in taxes & fees paid and then further keep another $50.91 worth of miles ($69.70 in total penalty minus the $18.79 of my money already paid that they would keep means they needed to take another $50.91). At $0.02 per mile, they would keep an additional 2,545 miles per passenger ($50.91 / $0.02 = 2,545 miles per passenger). Put differently, I should get back 50% of $139.39, which would be $69.70 worth of miles. At $0.02 per mile, that’s a refund of 3,485 miles per passenger due (assuming that they keep my $18.79). If they refunded any of the cash component, the mileage refund would be even less.

Based on the above calculations, I should have gotten 3,485 miles back per passenger. I got 5,100 miles back per passenger. That’s too much of a difference to be explained via currency fluctuation.

For what it’s worth, I also ran the numbers supposing that the back end department calculated my penalty as being only 25% (which would be wrong, but if this is a manual process, one has to allow for human error). Assuming a 25% cancellation penalty and accounting for the cash value of the miles at $0.02 plus the taxes and fees paid, I’d have expected a refund of about 5,227 miles. If we guess that maybe I’ll get the $5.60 in actual taxes back and the penalty is figured based on the cash value of miles plus the additional $13.19 in fees, the math gets a bit closer at a refund due of 5,017 miles, but it still doesn’t quite line up. And I should note again that since this cancellaiton occurred about 7 days and 1 minute prior to departure, I should have owed a 50% penalty (and I feared a 75% penalty due to the delay in processing).

To be clear, I’m not asserting that Award Wallet is wrong about how Etihad calculates “the fare” or the cancellation penalty. It is certainly possible that cancellation penalties are meant to be calculated the way that Award Wallet suggests. It isn’t hard for me to imagine an agent getting confused somewhere in the complex policy and making an error. If the agent mistakenly calculated my penalty at 25%, perhaps a currency conversion issue explains the difference between my calculated refund from the previous paragraph and my actual refund from the screen shot above. On the other hand, maybe the calculation is done a bit differently yet by some mystery set of factors that hasn’t yet been completely uncovered.

Have I been wrong to ignore Etihad Guest for low-mileage awards?

While the numbers above might make your head spin, if we step back for a moment and examine things from a wider view, I think that I may have been painting Etihad Guest’s cancellation policy with too broad a brush.

Our Reasonable Redemption Value for Etihad Guest miles is 1.1c per mile. At that value, the 930 miles per passenger that I lost are worth about $10.23. If we accept Etihad’s $0.02 valuation, which is higher than our RRV for any airline mile, the value of 930 miles would be $18.60.

Assuming that I lose the $18.79 in taxes & fees paid (I haven’t seen any refund yet), that means that my total cancellation penalty will be about $29.02 per passenger (based on our RRV of 1.1c per Etihad mile) or $37.39 if we go with the uber-generous $0.02 per mile valuation of Etihad miles.

Do I like a cancellation penalty that takes between $29-$38 in total value per passenger? Of course not. Do I like it better than the Air France-KLM Flying Blue cancellation penalty of $70 per passenger even on a short-distance Delta-operated itinerary that only costs 5,000 miles per passenger? Well, perhaps I do.

The difference of course is that the Flying Blue award can be cancelled any time up until check-in closes with no variation in penalty (and in the case of more expensive awards, the Flying Blue cancellation penalty is better by a monumental landslide), whereas Etihad has a sliding scale that gets more punitive closer to departure (and that is absolutely brutal on award tickets that cost a large number of miles).

Still, on really cheap awards (such as those that cost 6,000 or 12,000 Etihad miles per passenger), the Etihad cancellation penalty may not be awful.

If the award price through JetBlue were similar to the award cost of booking through Etihad, I would without a doubt prefer booking through JetBlue for easy and free cancellation up until just before departure. However, in some cases, the difference can be substantial. For instance, next Friday, JetBlue wants 19,600 miles plus tax for the flight from Boston to Milwaukee. Etihad is charging 12,000 miles plus $23.40 according to AwardTool. Qatar is only looking for 8,500 miles, making that the clear winner here!

If Qatar were not an option (it wasn’t at the time when I booked), and you’re reasonably sure that you would know more than 7 days in advance of departure whether you would need to cancel, you might rather book via Etihad given what might be a relatively small cancellation penalty and a decent mileage savings in the event that you travel as planned.

The problem is that it is hard to predict what the Etihad penalty will be. Will you have a similar-sized penalty to mine, or did the agent who calculated my refund make a mistake? Will you have to make a last-minute cancellation within 7 days of departure and get hit with a much higher penalty? I can’t predict either for sure.

However, based on my experience here, I’d be much more likely to take a gamble on an itinerary that only costs 6K or 12K miles per passenger, particularly in those scenarios where the spread is much larger. For instance, next Friday, one could fly from New York JFK to Nantucket for 6,030 Etihad Guest miles, which is quite a bit better than the 38,000 miles JetBlue is charging for the same flight (see the first and last line below, which represent the same flight).

A number of shorter-distance itineraries in the northeast can be a far better deal through Etihad Guest, particularly as you get closer to departure and/or to destinations with high demand.

In the future, I’d be far more likely to consider an award ticket like that for a weekend getaway.

Bottom line

Etihad Guest is a program that I had all but written off entirely thanks to a reputation for complexity and what can be an incredibly punitive award cancellation policy. However, my Etihad Guest bookings turned out a bit better than expected. When I ran into a problem with a missing birthday, it was easy to get that resolved via chat support. When I needed to cancel an award, the penalty was far less punitive than I’d had in mind thanks at least in part to the cheap award cost. While I’d still avoid Etihad like the plague for awards costing much more than 12,000 miles per passenger, I’m going to keep them in mind for short-distance partner award flights where the cancellation penalty might not be far worse than booking through some other foreign programs, but the award price may be far better.

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