United In The Time Of Coronavirus

You might read the title of this post to be an homage to how together we all are in the face of a spreading pandemic. You'd be wrong.

This week I was supposed to embark on my next adventure, a long weekend in Tortuguero National Park on the Caribbean Sea side of Costa Rica. Jungle. Beach. Canals. Central American food and beer. Monkeys. Sloths. Hopefully no snakes. And tons and tons of toucans. Or at least that's what I was hoping for. One more country in the books. One or more stamps in the old passport.

I'm not going. I've been hunkered down telecommuting to work over the last two weeks social distancing myself from everyone but my wife and hoping someone somehow someway finds a way out of this current coronavirus crisis. I'm not complaining here really (although I might be in a little bit). We are both healthy, employed, have tons of food and toilet paper and plenty of unread books and the electricity is on and the water's running. All things considered, it could be plenty worse. I know there are way too many people who are not this comfortable.

I believe this is the first trip in my life I've ever cancelled. I could be wrong. My memory sometimes isn't so great about these things. But I don't think I am. I cut one short once to beat a snowstorm home (I lost that race and spent two nights in the Detroit airport) but I can't remember cancelling one before. If I'd known this would happen, I would have spent a couple more days in The Bahamas. Maybe I could have gone down to Inagua and made another attempt to see those flamingos that keep eluding me on these trips.

The process of cancelling this trip varied from routine dealings with forgiving and apologetic companies to an exercise in extreme frustration. This post is either an effort to share that experience or a carthasis or both. It involved interface with four different companies: a tour operator, a worldwide hotel chain and two United States based airlines. Here's how it went.

Kenya. February 2018. Our transport for the week, courtesy of G Adventures.

The Tour Company

We were scheduled to take our long weekend at Tortuguero through G Adventures, a Canadian-based travel company that takes people all over the world to all seven continents. Our relationship started with this company in 2016 when we visited the Galápagos Islands. Since then we've been to Kenya, Tanzania and Peru with this company. They have always taken good care of us, they have amazing people working for them and they are socially responsible.

G Adventures was proactive in cancelling our trip, sending an email about a week and a half ago that all trips through April 30 would be cancelled. No refunds, but credit in our account equal to 110% of the purchase price good for use on trips with G through April of 2022. I get that some people might be upset about no refunds but the 110% credit is unnecessarily generous. We already have our next trip booked with these guys in October of this year so the credit is useful. Hoping this crisis is over by then. If not, I have a huge list of trips I want to take with G Adventures.

The Hotel

When we travel, we typically make our hotel and airfare reservations months and months ahead of time. One risk we take in booking early is taking advantage of non-refundable but slightly cheaper rates on our hotel bookings. Our G Adventures trip was all inclusive but would have required a red eye flight home so we elected to spend an extra night at a DoubleTree hotel before leaving San Jose. And yes, we booked the non-refundable rate. We figured we were sunk here. Risk is risk and we wouldn't be checking in for this reservation.

Fortunately, Hilton (which owns the DoubleTree brand) decided a crisis was a crisis and non-refundable would in fact in this case be refundable. No charge whatsoever! We appreciated this gesture of goodwill. They didn't have to do this and we could have easily have cut back in other areas of life to save the $150 or so we would have lost here but Hilton decided to take this one for us. Hooray for them. This is the second time in the last six months or so Hilton has done something good for us. This chain is definitely trending up on our loyalty scale. This sort of treatment will generate more business from us for Hilton properties.

Free snacks courtesy of Southwest at ATL. Free! For no reason. January 2017. The BEST airline!

Southwest Airlines

A little while ago I was talking with someone who travels frequently but maybe not quite as much as me. I had just come back from somewhere and mentioned we flew United to wherever it was we went. He asked how I like United. My response was something to the effect of all these airlines are the same; they just treat us like cattle and try to pack more and more of us into smaller and smaller spaces while charging for more and more. All airlines that is except Southwest. Seriously. That was a real conversation.

Our trip back from Costa Rica was on Southwest. We booked with points. It took maybe five minutes on their website to cancel and get our points and cash back. Maybe five minutes. Might have been shorter. It seems like every interaction I have with Southwest is amazing. They continue to be my favorite airline in the world. 

Umm...app not working. Hello? Hello!!

United Airlines

Remember that story two paragraphs ago about United? Come on...sure you do. It was just two paragraphs ago. We booked our trip down to Costa Rica through United using points. 

Like most travel companies addressing customers during the coronavirus crisis, United decided to make some alterations to their standard change and cancellation policies. This meant changes to flights and cancellations to flights would be permitted with no change fees (Southwest ALWAYS has no change fees for what that's worth). No refunds but credit could be used for alternate flights within one year of the original booking date.

A couple of things here. First, United didn't have to change their policy at all so I guess they should get a little credit for doing so. Second, credit is great but one year from the original booking date is not that great sometimes. We booked this trip in September, which means the credit would expire about six months from now. Given the fact that we booked with points and not wanting to commit ourselves to another destination in the next six months, we figured we'd cancel, get our points back and eat the $46.80 worth of fees and taxes we paid.

Not so fast! No cancellation and change fees means just that but United has a $125 charge per ticket to redeposit points back in your MileagePlus account. Come again? Moving points around, which I would do on the app or website myself, costs $125??? How does that make any sense? The most loyal customers, the frequent flyers, are made to spend $125 per ticket for something that costs United nothing? Apparently, yes. And there is no flexibility. You should see the comments on Twitter from frequent flyers on this one.

Not wishing to pay $250 to get 35,000 of our own miles redeposited in our account, we opted to try to find a different itinerary. United recommended their website or app for this transaction. Didn't work. We could book a new flight (why we want to do that right now?), cancel a flight and pay for our own miles back but not change the flight. Errored out every time. How does the website not even work right? What kind of a company has a website where the one transaction that would benefit their most loyal customers is the only one that doesn't work?

We called, waited 90 minutes on hold and ultimately changed our flight to a roundtrip to Maine in July. We added 5,000 more miles into the effort and are hoping that this whole thing is over by that point. If not, I expect we'll go through this whole exercise again, only if the one year from original date of booking rule is still in effect, we'll have about two months and a very quick end to the crisis to reschedule. For what it's worth, Ryan who answered the phone for United was awesome.

Considering the flexibility we got from the other three companies involved in this situation, United's conduct sticks out as selfish and unhelpful. There are some past interactions that have forever affected our willingness to travel with certain companies (Frontier, Eurowings and Icelandair come to mind here). We are not likely to leave United based on this experience, but we are likely to go another direction if other options (probably from Delta or American) are equally priced or maybe a couple of bucks more.

My next trips are in May and June. Right now I'm not convinced I'm going on those trips either but at least they are both domestic trips, which shouldn't matter but somehow to me it does. If this crisis is still going on, I'm hoping United has come around in their attitude towards their customers by June because our flights at that time are with them. 

I hate writing complaint posts, especially about a few hundred bucks or a few thousand frequent flyer miles at risk during a pandemic that might kill millions. Compared to the concerns of the people suffering and the families who have lost loved ones, my frustration with United is so unimportant. Stay as safe as you can be.