I was supposed to leave for China last Friday.  Unfortunately, I had to cancel my trip.

A few weeks ago my wife and I got the news that our dog had torn her ACL, and would need surgery if we wanted her to walk normally again and avoid a lifelong lame leg (or worse, a potential amputation).  While quite costly, we never consider not going ahead with the procedure.  If you’re an animal lover, I’m sure you understand.

That aside, I obviously wouldn’t be making the trip for which I had booked two separate award tickets – a one-way, business class ticket from the U.S. on American, and the same for the return on United.

I hold no status with either airline, so unless I wanted to forfeit my 55,000 American Airlines miles and my 70,000 United miles (the price for business class awards at the time they were booked), I needed to cough up the required fees to have my miles redeposited.

For United, the fee to redeposit miles is a hefty $200, and for American, $150.  Ouch!  Talk about a gut punch, especially considering the sizable vet bills that are coming our way.

But, with a little luck – it was sure nice to get some considering our lack of it in recent weeks – I was able to avoid some of the fees and get all of my miles back.

Here’s what I did.

A Credit Card to the Rescue

The lucky part comes as a result of my wife’s application and approval for the American Express Platinum card earlier this year.  She was scheduled to travel internationally quite a bit for work in 2016, so I thought the airline lounge access benefits associated with the card would come in handy.  The card has a number of other benefits, as well, the primary one related to this situation being the annual $200 airline fee reimbursement.

I had hoped to use the fee reimbursement to offset an airline ticket purchase or other retail purchases.   No, those aren’t airline “fees,” but if you click the links and read some of the posts, you’ll see the $200 benefit can be used in other ways. *Most of these tactics no longer work with American Express cards.

But, I digress…who knew we’d actually use the benefit for its intended purpose.  However, we did, and it came in very handy.

Another quick aside about the American Express Platinum card – it normally comes with a $550 annual fee, but there’s an Ameriprise version that waives the annual fee the first year while still giving all the fantastic benefits the card provides.  In answer to your question: neither my wife nor I are Ameriprise customers. The Ameriprise version no longer offers a fee-free first year option, unfortunately.

Anyway, I selected United as our Amex Platinum airline choice and used the card for the United “change” fee.

We were lucky to have had the American Express Platinum card’s airline fee reimbursement perk ready to use.  However, this shows that if you have an unexpected change/redeposit fee you really don’t want to pay out-of-pocket, you could always apply for the Ameriprise Amex Platinum card and use it to offset those ridiculous fees.

If you want even more information on the Amex Platinum card, you can read my recent review here.

American’s Fee

Now that my United miles were recovered, I turned my attention to my American award ticket.

Facing a $150 cancellation/redeposit fee, I searched for options to lessen that financial hit.

For the most part, airlines make it extremely difficult to get out of change fees.  They don’t really care what excuse you have – illness, death in the family, etc. – it’s a difficult process to have those fees waived.

There is one way, though, to get airlines to waive the change/redeposit fees, and that’s if the airline makes a change to your flight’s schedule.

There are varying theories, and experiences, on exactly what type of flight schedule change will result in an airline allowing a fee-free change/cancellation of an award ticket.

Which brings me to my experience.

About a month after scheduling my flight, I received an email telling me my flight to Shanghai had been changed.  Actually, the time didn’t change too much, but the aircraft and connecting airport did.  Since I still was arriving close to my originally scheduled time – and we hadn’t learned about the seriousness of our dog’s injury – I didn’t think anything of American’s change to my flight.

Until I needed to cancel, that is.

The actual time difference from the original flight’s arrival time to the new, rescheduled, flight’s was about 30 minutes.

I called American’s reservation line and said there had been a schedule change to my upcoming flight and it wasn’t going to work for me, I’d like to cancel and redeposit my miles without a fee.

At first I thought I’d lucked out.  She went through the cancel/redeposit process, but then said, “let me put you on hold for a minute.”  I knew that probably wasn’t good.

Sure enough, she came back and said to have the fee waived, the schedule change must be a one hour and one minute or more difference than the originally schedule itinerary.

There have been reports that airlines will allow no-fee changes for much less time differences than that, even down to 10-minute differences.  And there have been reports that some airlines require multi-hour differences before they’ll waive change fees.

No matter, getting a fee-free redeposit wasn’t going to work for me with this specific situation.

What options are there?

Well, there are a few options when faced with award ticket change fees.  The options below are specific to my situation, but can apply – depending on the airline – to situations where a change to an award ticket is needed.

1.  Change the flight to a future date – prior to the date on which it was originally booked – that has business class award availability and hope for a schedule change for that flight greater than an hour (American offers fee-free schedule changes as long as the departure and destination locations stay the same).  And thus, a fee-free redeposit of the miles.
2. Suck it up and pay the $150 to get the American miles redeposited.
3. Do nothing and lose the 55,000 miles.

I guess there’s even a fourth option, a combination of one and two, which would entail switching the reservation to a later date, applying for a credit card that offers the airline fee reimbursement and then pay all, or most, of the fee with that card.

I don’t really want to base future credit card applications solely on avoiding a fee, though, so I personally don’t find this a good option.  However, you might.

What did I do?

Considering I’m dealing with a post-op pup right now, I decided to go the easiest – even though it’s not the most financially prudent – route and just pay the $150 to get my points back.

My rationale: the 55,000 points equals two economy class round trip tickets within the continental U.S. that would cost significantly more than $150.

And if I put those 55,000 points toward another international business class award redemption, I’ll easily recoup the $150 considering most one-way business class seats price out in the neighborhood of $5,000.

Other Airlines’ Fees

I mention the award ticket change fees for United and American because those are the airlines on which my awards were booked, and whose charges I faced.

I do want to mention the other major U.S. carriers, Delta and Southwest, and their change fees/policies, as well, for informational purposes.

Delta:  For travelers with no (or low) status, Delta charges $150 per ticket for an award ticket cancellation or change.  However, Delta really hits you when a change/cancellation is made within 72 hours of the scheduled departure time.  If changes are made within that period, award miles are nonrefundable.

Southwest:  Southwest has the best change/cancellation policy of all of the major airlines (yes, I include Southwest in that category even though they normally aren’t considered one of the Big Three).  You can change/cancel any award reservation, up to the time of departure, without any penalty.  All points will be redeposited into your account.  Period.  Now that is a really nice benefit to flying Southwest.

Conclusion

When you make an award reservation, you likely aren’t thinking the trip won’t happen.  You just pick your dates, find award availability and book the trip.

But, things do happen. And when they do, you’ll have some decisions to make with regard to changing your tickets.

Hopefully, my experiences have not only brought to light the change fees associated with award tickets, but also provided some suggestions for  getting around them, or at least mitigating their financial hit.

Have you ever needed to change an award ticket?  If so, how did you handle the associated fees?

Update:  The $200 United Airlines award redeposit fee was not automatically reimbursed on the American Express Platinum Card.  However, a call to the toll free number on the back of the card quickly rectified the situation.  My guess why it wasn’t automatically reimbursed has to do with how it was coded on the Amex statement.  The “Document Type” stated Frequent Flyer Fee/Purchase.  The “purchase” wording likely complicated the situation.  No matter, if this happens to you, a call to Amex, stating a fee by your selected airline was not reimbursed, should take care of the problem.

image courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti and freedigitalphotos.net