Cancelling a LifeMiles award ticket: maybe less painful than you thought

Yesterday, I cancelled an Avianca LifeMiles award ticket. It was as expensive as I expected ($200 per passenger), but in the process I learned a few interesting things:

1. It isn’t as hard as I expected
2. It took far less time than I expected
3. You can’t cancel an award within 24hrs of your flight’s departure time. Instead, you have to wait until 24hrs after you missed the flight
4. You can cancel and re-deposit the miles after you missed a flight

All of the above was covered in a previous One Mile at a Time post that I referenced while going through the process, but I thought it was worth sharing my experience here for readers who may have missed that One Mile at a Time post.

Avianca LifeMiles has high change and cancellation fees

Before I get into the process, I want to recognize that Avianca LifeMiles has some of the worst change and cancellation fees of any airline program. At $150 to change or $200 to redeposit most international awards, this is not a good program with which to make a speculative booking. I rarely have to cancel award tickets, but if I’m unsure that plans are set, I generally avoid using LifeMiles.

That’s not to say that I avoid using LifeMiles in general. On the contrary, I use LifeMiles more often than any other individual airline currency since they offer excellent pricing on many routes and Star Alliance offers wide reach. But if you need flexibility, there are better options.

That said, in the case of the unexpected, a change or cancellation could still be worth it. I had heard previous horror stories of the difficulty of cancelling a LifeMiles award that went beyond the high fees, but my experience was that it wasn’t very difficult at all.

A tale of two different award cancellations

I had two separate bookings that I needed to cancel. Due to timing, the cancellation policies differed between my two reservations.

Last year, we reported on an Avianca LifeMiles sale that had Brussels to New York JFK on sale for just 25,500 miles one-way in business class on Brussels Airlines. That’s an incredible price for transatlantic business class, so I jumped on it for my family of four. Unfortunately, for the timeframe we had in mind, we couldn’t find a single day with four seats available. We had therefore split up: we booked my wife and our 5yr old on one day and our 2yr old and me on the same flight the next day.

The short story is that we ultimately made another set of travel plans following this trip and had subsequently booked a separate economy class ticket from New York JFK to Vancouver immediately following our return from Belgium — so we were going to get off a flight from Brussels to New York in business class and step on an economy class transcontinental flight the same day. At 36,600 JetBlue miles per passenger, the economy class transcon flight actually cost more miles than the business class flight from Brussels to New York.

Then, a few days before departure, a bunch of seats opened up on British Airways in business class that would take us from Brussels to London to Vancouver and it was available via American Airlines for 57,500 miles and $340 per passenger. We’d have one stop either way, but whereas the original itinerary had us flying 8.5hrs in business class from Brussels to New York followed by 6hrs in economy class to Vancouver, the new plan had us flying 1hr to London in European business and then 9.5hrs to Vancouver in flat-bed business class. That seemed enough better to justify both paying the $200 per person in Avianca cancellation fees and the ~$340 per passenger taxes & fees on the British Airways award via American Airlines. It wasn’t a cheap decision, but we ultimately decided that it made sense for us for a number of reasons. I should note that while I’ll pay $800 in cancellation fees for my family of four, I’ll get back 102,000 Avianca LifeMiles and $400 in taxes.

But all of that set-up is to explain that I had to contact Avianca to cancel two separate bookings (and I was doing this on August 8th):

1. Mrs Reyes & Baby Rey 1 were due to fly on Aug 9th
2. Me & Baby Rey 2 were due to fly on Aug 10th

I had booked all four seats with my Avianca LifeMiles. The date timeline above is pertinent because it meant that I’d need to work on two different timelines and make two different phone calls to cancel and redeposit everything (more under “Avianca LifeMiles award cancellation rules” below).

The phone menu to cancel an Avianca LifeMiles booking

Avianca LifeMiles has earned a reputation for being difficult for a lot of reasons. For starters, their website hasn’t been working well for weeks (see a potential solution here) and it frequently doesn’t show all of the availability it should (or other times you just need to be versed in the quirks of Smart Search vs Star Alliance vs airline-specific search).

However, over the past year or two, my experiences with Avianca LifeMiles support have been overwhelmingly positive despite things being convoluted more often than not. Agents have generally known how to help me even in situations where I expected a lot of difficulty (here’s an example).

Yet again with my cancellation, I found agents to be well-informed. My call got disconnected the first time, so I had to call twice — and both times, agents understood me clearly, pulled up my bookings, correctly explained the cancellation process, etc. I mention all of that to say that one probably needn’t fear calling Avianca LifeMiles customer service these days as most agents seem to be better-trained than in the past.

In this case, One Mile at a Time had the steps laid out clearly and that really helped save time and difficulty in navigating the phone menus. Here’s the outline they provided:

1. Call 1-866-919-0081
2. Press 2 for English
3. Enter your LifeMiles number
4. Press 3 for LifeMiles Services
5. Press 3 again for transactions made with your LifeMiles account

Avianca LifeMiles award cancellation rules

Both times that I called, I was connected to an agent within less than 20 seconds. I’m sure that wait times vary tremendously, but I was calling in late afternoon Eastern time and was surprised at how quickly I got an agent on the line.

I explained that I was looking to cancel two bookings made with my LifeMiles and I was immediately asked for the first booking reference code. Then I had to verify the names of the passengers and then repeat the process for the second booking. After verifying my LifeMiles number again, the agent looked over the bookings. When she came back on the line, she let me know that the rules for cancellations meant that I would need to handle the two bookings differently:

1. The booking on August 9th was within 24hrs of departure, so it could no longer be cancelled. Instead, I would need to wait until 24hrs after the flight departure and then call back in to pay the cancellation fee and redeposit the miles.
2. The booking on August 10th was more than 24hrs away, so I could pay the cancellation fee and redeposit the miles (but read on for how that process works).

I was surprised about everything in #1: I didn’t know that I couldn’t cancel within 24hrs of departure. And while I had read on One Mile at a Time that an itinerary could be cancelled and redeposited after departure, that had surprised me when I read it on One Mile at a Time and even still I was surprised when the agent explained that I could indeed call 24hrs after the flight departure time had passed to pay the fee and redeposit the miles for a no-show. That’s certainly convenient: many programs make you forfeit the miles used in the case of a no-show.

I was therefore only able to cancel one of my two bookings in advance, but that gave me some experience handling the process.

The process of cancelling an Avianca LifeMiles award ticket and paying the penalty

As you might expect, Avianca’s process for cancelling a LifeMiles award ticket is a little convoluted.

The phone agent took my booking reference and verified the names of passengers and my Avianca LifeMiles account number. After checking all of the details, she put me on hold a couple of times and finally transferred me to a system to verify my Avianca LifeMiles PIN. If you haven’t yet set a PIN, you can do that in your account profile on the website.

I successfully verified my PIN and the agent came back on the line to explain the next steps.

She would ultimately put me on hold again and send an email with a link to make payment of the cancellation penalty. I would then need to pay that fee within 3 hours of the email in order to confirm the cancellation. Then, within 24hrs, I should get my miles back once the accounting department has verified everything. One Mile at a Time reports that the redeposit should happen within 24-72hrs, but the agent told me “within 24hrs”. We’ll see what the timeline ends up being, but either way you need to know that you can’t redeposit and immediately use the miles since the redeposit is not instant. And if it doesn’t happen automatically, it sounds like I could be in for a headache.

If I hadn’t read the One Mile at a Time post, I never in a million years would have known that an email from the sender “do-not-reply” with the subject line “Payment instructions or your order” had anything to do with my Avianca LifeMiles booking.

Again, had I not read the One Mile at a Time post, I can’t imagine I’d have clicked to open that email.

Had I clicked to open that email, I don’t think I’d have clicked the link within that email.

And had I clicked the link within that email, I wouldn’t have expected to follow up by entering my credit card details on the page it brought up.

However, I knew what to expect and so I did click on that link and sure enough it brought up an Avianca page that had the cancellation fee entered correctly. I put in credit card details and made the payment before the agent even came back from putting me on hold to send me the email (at least this fee helped me toward spending requirements for a new card bonus).

The agent reminded me that I had 3hrs to pay and I told her that I’d already done it and she said to be on the lookout for the redeposit of the miles within the next 24hrs. That was it. The entire phone call was just over 11 minutes.

In contrast to the mileage refund, I was told that it would take about 30 days to see a refund of the taxes. That’s kind of annoying, but not a huge deal as long as they eventually get refunded. I trust that they will.

Bottom line

The process of cancelling an Avianca LifeMiles award booking is predictably Aviancish with the need to call (as opposed to doing this online) and speak to someone who verifies details and then transfers you to a different system to verify your PIN but then has to email you a link to pay the cancellation fee at a URL that is not Avianca.com or LifeMiles.com but which you need to recognize is from Avianca even though it doesn’t say it is from Avianca and you only have a limited time to do that and then you need to wait a day (or maybe a few) to get the miles back. Not only all that, but you also need to pay $200 per passenger for the joy of that process. That’s obviously not pretty or cool or best-in-class by any stretch of the imagination. However, at the end of the day, I’ll get back miles that are more valuable to me than the cost to cancel and it only took 11 minutes to make the process happen. At the end of the day, that was better than I expected when I decided to go ahead and cancel, so I’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much easier it was than I expected rather than bitter over how much it cost.

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