On March 8th United made a no notice change to it’s refund policy on schedule changes. Previously if there was a schedule change of more than two hours you could get refunded, that was changed to needing to be more than 25 hours. To make matters worse United decided it was a good idea to retroactively apply this to tickets already booked. After backlash United unofficially changed the policy to allow for a travel credit for changes of 2 to 25 hours (although this was never actually added to the terms). After even more backlash United is telling Brian Summers (who first broke this story) that it will be replacing it with a policy that allows them to make case by case decisions.
Hello. @united tells me it will change this refund policy, which I first reported on Saturday. It is “replacing it with a policy that will allow us to make case-by-case decisions to better serve our customers during these uncertain times,” it said. More details Wednesday. https://t.co/YGjD24z48p
— Brian Sumers (@BrianSumers) March 11, 2020
Case by case decisions is code word for we want to offer the original refund policy to as few people as possible, but we also don’t want to deal with the backlash of our customers being angry. United I’ll give you a piece of advice for free, this new case by case policy isn’t going to fly with consumers either and you’ve shown again that you have an inability to understand why consumers are angry when you make a mistake. An appropriate response would have been to acknowledge that you made a mistake, state that you’ve listened to customers concerns and are now fixing the issue (in this case offering refunds for schedule changes of more than two hours for all customers that booked with that policy in place).
