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Over the past couple of days, we have seen several reports in our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group indicating that United is now waiving award redeposit fees on cancelled flights. To be clear, to my knowledge this is only on flights that have been cancelled by the airline, but it’s better than being told that you need to pay.
United has been pretty awful in terms of its response to customers over the current pandemic. Trying to charge a redeposit fee to get your miles back on flights that they aren’t being operated seems absolutely bonkers to me. I can’t think of another industry where you could buy and pay for something and then be told it’s not available anymore and you need to pay a fee to get your payment back. I get that these cancellations aren’t United “fault”, but neither are they the customer’s fault. In the case of award tickets, United doesn’t need to dig too deep to come up with the refund given that it’s mostly in the form of an imaginary currency they can create out of thin air (plus some small amount in taxes that they theoretically get back from the government entities anyway). Still, they’ve been charging redeposit fee to get the miles back until this weekend.
We started getting some reports yesterday morning of redeposits without a fee and last night Dan’s Deals reported that this is United’s new policy-of-the-hour. According to Dan, United will waive the fee to redeposit miles on award flights cancelled by the carrier, whether on United metal or partners. Keep in mind that while a lot of flights have been cancelled already, there are many situations where airlines are waiting until the last minute to cancel, so your best bet (if your flight is not yet cancelled) is to wait until about 24 hours prior to departure to see if the airline will cancel for you before calling.
If you already paid the redeposit fee on a flight that they had cancelled, you can try calling United to ask for it back. If they turn you down, you can try filing a DOT complaint. Unfortunately, there isn’t a secret sauce in terms of getting them to do the right thing — it’s likely going to require patience and persistence. Don’t give up.
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[…] pivoted from one customer-unfriendly policy to another over the past few weeks before finally doing the right thing on something this weekend, so maybe S7 will not only pick up some good press here but actually get a few people to credit at […]
That was my experience. Early Saturday morning I called to redeposit my miles after a flight was cancelled and the agent smoothly said no problem, it’ll just be $125 (or was it $150) per ticket. I objected to the fee and she said ok, no problem and proceeded to redeposit the miles without a fee.
United has also managed to waive any future bookings on my part. What was already a poor example of customer service has become worse. People remember when you screw with their money….hours spent on hold, a promise of miles redeposit and refund almost 4 weeks ago…still waiting…
My trip to Europe was scheduled for June 3, not yet cancelled by the airline. I called yesterday, waited on hold for less than a minute (!), told the operator I wanted to cancel my flight and have the miles re-deposited. She immediately fulfilled my request, taxes refunded, miles re-deposited, no fees. My 240k miles were back in my United account within 5 minutes.
Good 4 U !!!
Singapore points United Flts ??