I've booked millions of miles of SkyMiles award tickets, so am pretty damn familiar with the policies. Tonight, however, I hit a new rule I've never heard of.
I had two different agents tell me changing the outbound of an unflown award ticket causes it to reprice---using the *current* award availability. As in, if you are holding an award at low, and make a change to another low flight, but the remainder of your itinerary is no longer available at low, the whole thing may reprice to medium or high! :eek:
To be concrete consider a award XXX-ATL-CDG-ATL-YYYY. All low. Now, try to change it to ZZZ-ATL-CDG-ATL-YYY, where ZZZ-ATL is available in low. The remainder of the segments, however, are only available in medium. The entire award now prices at the medium level.
Obviously, this has always been the case for revenue tickets, but never, in my experience, for awards. Indeed, I've already made several changes to the ticket in question. When I pointed that out to one of the agents she said "yes, I see that, and I cannot comment on why you may have been able to break the rules in the past."
The only potential wrinkle I can think of is I was trying to change a TATL flight from originating in NA to originating in Hawaii, so I was expecting a 10K miles up-charge. The agent insisted, however, that it wasn't my change in region that was triggering the reprice, but any change at all to the outbound would do so.
Normally, I'd say it was a mis-informed agent and hang up and call back, but I did, and got the same answer from the second agent. Somebody please tell me I got two clueless agents!?!?
I had two different agents tell me changing the outbound of an unflown award ticket causes it to reprice---using the *current* award availability. As in, if you are holding an award at low, and make a change to another low flight, but the remainder of your itinerary is no longer available at low, the whole thing may reprice to medium or high! :eek:
To be concrete consider a award XXX-ATL-CDG-ATL-YYYY. All low. Now, try to change it to ZZZ-ATL-CDG-ATL-YYY, where ZZZ-ATL is available in low. The remainder of the segments, however, are only available in medium. The entire award now prices at the medium level.
Obviously, this has always been the case for revenue tickets, but never, in my experience, for awards. Indeed, I've already made several changes to the ticket in question. When I pointed that out to one of the agents she said "yes, I see that, and I cannot comment on why you may have been able to break the rules in the past."
The only potential wrinkle I can think of is I was trying to change a TATL flight from originating in NA to originating in Hawaii, so I was expecting a 10K miles up-charge. The agent insisted, however, that it wasn't my change in region that was triggering the reprice, but any change at all to the outbound would do so.
Normally, I'd say it was a mis-informed agent and hang up and call back, but I did, and got the same answer from the second agent. Somebody please tell me I got two clueless agents!?!?