Last March, our family of four traveled to Kauai for a winter break from the Northeast snow. In planning the trip, we made several adjustments along the way, the most major of which was changing our flights from departing from Kauai to the mainland to departing from Honolulu. And we changed from using American Airlines miles to using US Airways miles. We did this so we were able to return to the east with extended family that had decided to join our trip after our flights were initially booked. We also did this to leverage a stopover opportunity prior to traveling to Dubai later in the year.
As a reminder, US Airways allows one stopover or an open jaw on an award ticket, and the ticket must be roundtrip (or one-way at the cost of a roundtrip ticket). Changes before travel commences incur a hefty $150 fee and there are no changes allowed after travel commences. Or so I thought… So, with these rules in mind, I booked two business class tickets from Honolulu to Newark (stopover for 7 months) then JFK to Dubai (via Vienna). The return was Dubai to JFK (via Vienna), 23 hour layover in New York, and then continuing from Newark back to Honolulu. The trouble with this routing is that we live on the east coast, not Honolulu and adding another Hawaiian vacation immediately after a 10 day Middle East trip was not a possibility for our family. So, glumly, I knew that we’d simply have to forgo a 10 hour trip in United’s BusinessFirst seat. In the end, one of our tickets cost 110,000 US Airways miles and one cost 120,000 plus about $115 in taxes each. Clearly, the agent who charged us 110,000 miles is geographically challenged as many agents at US Airways are…
Fast forward to July… There is a schedule change on our Newark – Honolulu segment. Realizing that this may be my only opportunity to perhaps change that leg to a date that we might actually be able to use, I gave US Airways a call. It was a long shot as our travel had already commenced, but it was worth a try. The agent promptly noticed that there was a schedule change on that one leg. I stated that yes, that was why I was calling. The new time did not work for me (it was about a 4 hour schedule change) and that I’d like to change my flight to a different date. She said that she would have to check with the rate desk as my travel had already commenced (we flew the HNL-EWR leg in March). She came back and said that although travel had already commenced and that we already used our one stopover, they would allow the change. I believe she mumbled something about us misconnecting due to the schedule change, but that was incorrect. I did not try to correct her and gave her the date that we could travel that I knew had availability. About 5 minutes later, she came back and informed me the changes were made. Within 2 minutes I received my new itinerary via email.
To recap, I was allowed to make a change to my US Airways award ticket, violating 2 of the known rules of the Dividend Miles program, without a fee and now my family has added another Hawaiian vacation to our docket as a result. That’s basically two roundtrip business class tickets (one roundtrip to Dubai and one roundtrip to Hawaii) for the price of one. Based upon my extensive research on the topic, US Airways does not allow any changes to award tickets after travel commences for any reason. However, because I gave it a shot, we will reap the benefits of an agent’s flexibility (mistake?). I believe I read somewhere that you should always hang up and call back three times when trying to push the limits with award tickets. I think that’s probably correct, especially with US Airways. You never know, you might actually get what you’re looking for!
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