Having a Comfortable Long haul Flight without Paying the Freight? Can’t afford business class but want to travel to Europe in comfort? Here is a hack that was highlights through a recent consumer advocacy column written by Chris Elliott. Upshot? If you want a little more space and want to ensure no one sits between you and your partner or travel mate here is an affordable hack to employ. But as with most easy and quick fixes, it comes with caveats.
Q: I book three nonrefundable airline tickets for my wife and me on United Airlines to fly from Orlando to Rome. United resold the middle seat between us on three of the five flights.
Long haul Flight
I asks for a refund, but United is telling me I can’t get my money back since I purchase nonrefundable tickets.
But how can they resell the seats I paying for? I send emails to the executive contacts for United on your website, but United won’t even give me a travel credit.
Can you help me get the $660 back I spent for the extra seat? — L.R., Winter Garden, Fla.
A: United Airlines should have kept the middle seat you paid for empty. United offers the option of buying an extra seat for the same price as your original ticket if you need more room. That obligates United to keep the seat empty — it can’t resell the seat halfway through the flight.
Adventure
Your case brings up a long-standing grievance among air travelers for Long haul Flight. When you have a nonrefundable ticket and can’t make your flight, your airline can resell the ticket, collecting money for the same seat twice. This strikes many air travelers as unfair. In the past, lawmakers have suggest legislating this unfairness and mandating that an airline refund a nonrefundable ticket if it can resell the seat, but so far, nothing has passes.
Long haul Flight
You were smart to escalate this to the executives at United. But I would have kept going. I list multiple executives on the site, and you could have been more persistent. Also, you might have considered a credit card dispute. Under the Fair Credit Billing Act, you can file a chargeback for items you paid for but didn’t receive, such as an airline seat.
So what went wrong with your ticket? I checked with United and it said for some reason, the boarding pass for your extra seat wasn’t scanned when you boarded your first flight. You told me that you reached out to United the day before your flight when you had a problem checking in. The agent instructed you to deselect the extra seat when you checked in.
Tradition
“The reservation was marked as a no-show by our team in Orlando, which ended up canceling the advance seating assignments,” the representative said. “That made the extra seat available for reassignment.”
United should have seen the problem when you reached out to the airline and then to its executives. Instead, it kept turning you down. But after the airline reviewed your case, it decided to change its answer.
“We’ve processed a refund for the extra ticket that was purchased,” the representative told me.
Lesson learned: If you buy an extra seat, always scan the boarding pass for the extra seat. All airlines — not just United — will cancel the rest of your reservation if you miss one leg of your flight. In fact, this could have turned out much worse. United could have canceled all of the tickets on your reservation, which might have stranded you in Frankfurt or Rome, your stopovers.
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