United extended vouchers until 12/31/22 (and made them easier to use)

File this under “old news”, but somehow I missed this a month ago and so I figured it was worth a quick post for any readers in the same boat: United has extended travel vouchers (both “Future Flight Credit” and “Travel Certificates”) until 12/31/2022 (note a small difference between the two types covered below). If you had a voucher set to expire in the remainder of 2021, it should now be extended to the end of 2022. United has also made it much easier to use multiple vouchers on a single booking.

I noticed this last night because I had a travel credit in my account that I knew was set to expire on October 18th. My credit was originally from a voluntary bump I took in October 2019. The voucher I received was originally scheduled to expire on October 18, 2020. In response to the pandemic, United had extended the voucher by a year and so the expiration had been listed as October 18, 2021. I logged on last night to make a booking and noticed that this credit is now scheduled to expire December 31, 2022. That’s awesome as it gives me a lot more time to find a use for the rest of the credit.

What’s more is that I also had several future flight credits thanks to having rebooked a United flight 5 times in 5 days at the end of August thanks to daily price drops. Those credits from cancelling and rebooking originally showed an expiration date of 1 year from the dates of booking (August 2022). All of those credits have now been extended to December 31, 2022. That’s great, too.

Note a small but key distinction between the two types of credits:

• Travel Certificates (like my bump voucher shown at top left above) expire 12/31/22, but I believe it should be possible to book travel with those through the end of the schedule at that time. In other words, I believe I could wait until 12/30/22 and book a trip for November of 2023 with that credit.
• Future flight credits must begin travel by 12/31/22. This means that my trip could extend into 2023 but I must take the first leg of the trip by 12/31/22.

Almost equally exciting, United has made it really easy to apply Travel Certificates and Future Flight Credits to your booking — including combining multiple credits. In the past, you had to log in to your account and find the certificate number you wanted to use to copy and paste into the right field at checkout and you could only apply one online (I’d heard you could combine a couple over the phone). Now, these credits now all show up during the checkout process. I went to book a flight and didn’t need to find any information from my account — I was able to just check boxes next to the credits I wanted to use until there was enough to cover my flight. That is a very customer-friendly change.

Again, the extension of flight credits isn’t news but rather a piece of news I had missed, so it seemed worth a mention for anyone else who missed it and is sitting on a credit with the nagging feeling that they need to remember to book something while they can. The ability to apply multiple credits to a single booking definitely wasn’t there when I made several rebookings back in late August. I’m not sure if they also launched that in early September, but whenever they added that it was a great move for those of us with credits to use.

Overall, these are solid moves from United in light of the current times. I look forward to putting my credits to use at a later date.

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