Flight changed by 2 hours — can I get a refund?

The flight time was perfect — a 3:15 p.m. nonstop from San Francisco to Orlando on a Friday afternoon of Martin Luther King’s birthday weekend. With that in mind, my clients booked a five-day stay at Disney World, because the flight time meant they wouldn’t have to pull their son out of school early.

But, a few weeks later, United changed their schedule, and the flight now leaves at 1 p.m. Classes get out at 12:30 p.m. that day.

We found another less-ideal, but acceptable, alternative with another carrier. United could only offer some difficult red-eye connections or a flight the following day. Surely with that big a change in the time of departure, the airline would give a refund, right?

In the end, the answer is probably yes. Our agency has sent off a request for refunds. But, after a dozen calls to United reservations, we’ve gotten just about as many answers.

The first agent said, “Sorry, the change is less than four hours, so the passengers will have to pay a fee for any changes, or the $150 penalty if they choose to reissue the tickets.”

Yet, another said, “Oh, go ahead and refund it — Any change the client doesn’t like is no problem.”

Another agent said, “Okay, the change is more than two hours so it’s “probably” fine to refund.”

An agent on a followup call said, “The the rule was 90 minutes, submit it to refunds.”

The “strictest” agent I talked to said the clients had to accept one of United’s alternatives — nonrefundable was nonrefundable. Another said the best the airline could do was let the passengers use their ticket later for another destination without penalty.

After a while it got amusing, sort of. We have emailed the refund department with fingers crossed.

Now, it was tempting just to take the name of the agent who advised us to just refund the ticket and go ahead and process it accordingly. But, these days, if travel agents refund a nonrefundable ticket and the airline doesn’t like it, they can bill the agency.

In that situation, agents have little recourse. While we can dispute the the bill, called a “debit memo,” an agency that refuses to pay can be banned from booking the airline in question.

In this case, having the name the United agent and date of the advice that we could refund the ticket would be helpful if we got the dreaded debit memo, but it seemed safer to go directly to refunds.

It might be fare to ask whether the client would have been better off if they had not booked through a travel agency. Actually probably not, unless they got one of the lenient United agents and even then, the reservation agent would have directed them to refunds. Had a traveler got a reservation agent who said no, or two or three of such agents, they might well have given up.

This problem isn’t exclusive to United Airlines. American and Delta provided a variety of answers for a similar situation.

Most of the answers noted that the 90 minute to 2 hour range of departure time was the cutoff for a refund. One American Airlines agent told me, “Refunds will be provided if the schedule change was for at least 91 minutes, exactly, but not a minute less.” While no agent said the clients were completely stuck, a couple said that while there would be no penalty the ticket would have to be reused in some way with the original carrier.

In general, my sense is that most carriers will eventually give you a refund for a significant flight time change, especially if you have a good reason for needing the refund (15 minutes doesn’t count as significant, unless it means you no longer have a legal connecting time).

But, with reason, any carrier will also try to find another flight on their airline. This means, within reason, a travel agent or traveler can change the ticket to almost any other flight that day if there are seats available. Passengers and travel agents just need to be polite and possibly persistent.

If you get someone who won’t budge, try back. With luck it won’t take eight callbacks to get the answer you want.