United Travel Bank is dead for easy airline incidental credits

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There’s been a bit of a stir over the past few days about United Travel Bank. Doctor of Credit reports that it no longer works to trigger airline incidental credits for charges as of 2/5/26 based on some reddit and Flyertalk comments. However, with the failure point reportedly being only 11 days ago, I would strongly advise against panic at this point. This isn’t the first time that blogs have prematurely claimed this “dead”.

Almost every year, we see a period of time where reimbursements suddenly slow down and take 2-3 weeks to arrive. I have always advised against assuming (or reporting) a failure until at least 2-3 weeks have passed without reimbursement. It is certainly possible that this is dead, but I think that declaring it dead already is very premature.

For years, United TravelBank has been a popular way to trigger airline incidental credits. Some cardholders would purchase a couple of $100 TravelBank deposits each year, and those purchases would be reimbursed by their credit card. That’s because money deposited to United TravelBank essentially functions as a cumulative gift card balance, and it is valid for 5 years from the date of purchase. Buying TravelBank credit has essentially been a way to “bank” credits from multiple years and/or multiple cards and then use those accumulated credits on a single booking or to time-shift their use.

It was always a bit of a surprise that TravelBank worked, since it doesn’t clearly fit with the traditionally defined uses of incidental credits. Nonetheless, it is but one of many ways to trigger airline incidental credits that seem to fall outside of the purview of “incidentals”.

Most credit card airline fee reimbursements are credited within a few days of purchase. However, of crucial importance here is the fact that it sometimes takes a few weeks. If you scroll back through years of comments on the post Amex Airline Fee Reimbursements. What still works?, you’ll find numerous times where there have been premature reports of one technique or another being “dead”, only for a success report to come in a week or two later. Sometimes, these credits just required a little patience.

Doctor of Credit is one of my favorite blogs on the Internet and is a highly trustworthy source that I often recommend alongside our site. However, this isn’t the first time that DoC has declared TravelBank dead at what felt to me like a premature juncture. Back in January of 2021, the same type of thing happened, and I also cautioned against panicking then. I can’t recall exactly how long it was before that resolved, but it certainly did resolve and has been working in the years since. And there are also times when the TravelBank system itself has gone down and returned, leading some to speculate that it was dead or that it may have changed, only for it to continue working.

We have also seen a couple of periods of time where reimbursements really did stop working for a bit, only to return. And we saw a change in recent years whereby “gifting” TravelBank credit no longer works. Buying it for your own TravelBank account has still worked (until this round of reports).

For what it’s worth, I’m not the only person urging some patience here. Reading a handful of comments at a Flyertalk thread to which DoC links, you’ll find some others also pointing out that reimbursements sometimes take a few weeks.

The difference this time around is that numerous reddit data points seem to be pointing to being told that a change was made on 2/6 specifically. That absolutely could be true. On the other hand, I could easily imagine a scenario where a customer service agent or three is pressed for a reason why purchase X hasn’t triggered a credit, whereas purchase Y (from some earlier date) did trigger the credit, and that customer service rep claims it is because something changed on date Z. Almost every year, we see a bottleneck at some point where these credits take longer than usual to post, but I wouldn’t expect the average customer service rep to know that.

To be very clear, it is possible that United TravelBank no longer works to trigger airline incidental credits. If I had incidental credits to use, I would probably hold off on trying to use them for United TravelBank unless and until we get success reports for charges from 2/6 onward. It makes sense to slow down and wait and see what happens. However, I think this is firmly in “wait and see” territory and not yet ready to be declared dead.

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