Dear Tripped Up,
Last September, my wife and I flew from Tucson, Ariz., to Venice for a riverboat trip. My wife returned on Oct. 12, flying Lufthansa from Venice to Denver, with a final leg to Tucson on United Airlines, without incident, while I stuck around for a photography workshop. But on the morning of my identical Oct. 17 return itinerary, I received a text message canceling the Denver-to-Tucson segment. The notice gave no explanation, and when I looked online, I was surprised to see that the flight was still scheduled and had around a dozen seats available. I called United, but the representative said I had to speak to Lufthansa, the airline we had booked through. A Lufthansa representative told me she could not get me on the flight, saying she did not have access to United screens. She offered to rebook my entire itinerary for the next day. But I had an appointment I couldn’t miss, so I booked a new ticket on the Denver-to-Tucson flight for $598 plus a $50 seat assignment fee. I have since written to Lufthansa and United, both Star Alliance members, to try to seek reimbursement, but all I’ve gotten back is the $50 seat fee and a nonsensical response that my reservation was canceled because of weather issues. I’m a) frustrated and b) still out $598. Can you help? Dan, Tucson, Ariz.
Dear Dan,
Grab some carrots, because we’re about to go down an airline ticketing rabbit hole. You’ll get your $598 back at the end, but only as a “good-will gesture” from United, which still thinks you did something wrong by breaking a rule neither you nor most travelers know about.
When I got in touch with Erin Jankowski, a spokeswoman for United, she told me on the phone that your seat on that final Denver-to-Tucson flight had been canceled because it was flagged as a duplicate reservation, activating the airline’s fraud detection system.
Wait, what duplicate reservation?
When I called to tell you what Ms. Jankowski had told me, you explained: The Lufthansa-operated flight on the second leg of your outgoing trip to Europe had turned back to Denver because of a sick passenger, and was eventually canceled. At Denver International Airport, your wife got in line at a Lufthansa counter to get hotel vouchers and try to rebook while you, concerned you might miss the departure of the river cruise you were taking, made (and paid for) backup reservations that would get you and your wife to Venice in time for your trip in case Lufthansa customer service didn’t come through.
The backup itinerary’s return legs matched the flights you had previously booked.
But you didn’t end up needing those backup tickets. You told me that at about 2 a.m., Lufthansa sent you both new reservations that would get you to Venice in time, on United via Newark, N.J. Hours before your flight the next morning, you canceled the backup flights for a full refund — but not, it appears, before United’s systems detected and flagged your duplicate Denver-to-Tucson return leg.
As Ms. Jankowski pointed out, such a duplicate is prohibited by United’s contract of carriage. The airline “reserves the right to cancel bookings” for a number of reasons, including when they are duplicates “made for the same passenger on flights traveling on or about the same date between one or more of the same or nearby origin or destination cities.”
Many other carriers — I checked American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and Lufthansa — have similar rules against duplicate tickets and other “impossible” or “illogical” bookings. Such rules exist to prevent travelers from tying up inventory with reservations they eventually plan to cancel in order to gain some advantage, including maintaining flexible travel plans at the potential expense of other customers.
I can see how the airline might argue this is what you were doing, albeit with no ill intentions. You didn’t cancel your backup flights until the next morning, so it is possible your maneuver took the spots of two people who needed to get to Europe just as much as you did.
Opinions will vary on whether what you did is OK, but the rule exists. Still, the way it was enforced seems both arbitrary and unfair.
Arbitrary because only one small component of your itinerary — your return from Denver to Tucson three weeks later — was flagged. Meanwhile, your wife was also double-booked on that route, and that reservation survived. And you were both double-booked on those United flights to Venice on your outbound trip, which also went undetected. Perhaps United’s fraud-seeking algorithms need some tweaking one way or another.
And unfair because no one informed you that your ticket had been canceled until three weeks later. Otherwise, at worst, you could have booked a replacement flight for much less than the $598, plus seat selection fee, you spent for a day-of ticket. (As of this writing, United’s current Denver-to-Tucson one-way flights three weeks out are all less than $250.)
In an email, Ms. Jankowski of United implied it was not her airline’s fault, and that Lufthansa should have told you about the cancellation sooner.
Lufthansa put the blame back on United. “Lufthansa did not remove that segment,” wrote a spokeswoman for the airline, Christina Semmel, by email. If these two Star Alliance partner airlines could not get their stories straight even under media scrutiny, what hope do average customers have when something goes wrong on an itinerary that includes a code-share, the term for when you book through one airline but the flights are operated, in whole or in part, by another?
You also mentioned you had written to both United and Lufthansa to get a refund, but had not heard back. Ms. Jankowski noted as part of our lengthy back-and-forth that you were due a partial refund for the canceled leg, but it would have to come from Lufthansa.
Ms. Semmel said she could not answer questions about your refund unless you gave me power of attorney, a Lufthansa quirk I have encountered before. You gamely filled out the form, but before that led anywhere, you received a message that United was refunding you $598.
Ms. Jankowski noted that it had come from United because Lufthansa had not refunded the smaller amount it owed you. “No change in our stance,” she wrote, “just making a good-will gesture.”
What can we learn from this? The obvious lesson for travelers here is not to double-book, ever. That said, if you desperately need a backup plan, do it on a different airline in a different alliance. (This still violates some airlines’ rules, but they are far less likely to catch you.)
The second lesson is to avoid code-share reservations unless you have a good reason not to. The fact that Lufthansa could not rebook you on a United flight that obviously had seats is troubling. Nor is it a good sign that neither United nor Lufthansa notified you as soon as your flight was canceled, instead of three weeks later.
Unsolvable service snafus and constant buck-passing on code-share flights are regular themes in the Tripped Up inbox. At their best, airline alliances allow us to book flights from Tucson to Venice (or Poland to Namibia) on a single itinerary or collect miles on Air India and use them to fly from Albuquerque to Chicago. But at their fragile worst, they cause a world of trouble.
If you need advice about a best-laid travel plan that went awry, send an email to [email protected].
Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2025.
Seth Kugel is the columnist for “Tripped Up,” an advice column that helps readers navigate the often confusing world of travel.
The post Help! United Canceled My Flight, Then Sold Me a Seat on It. appeared first on New York Times.
