United hasn’t been good when it comes to providing refunds to customers for cancelled and changed flights. After changing their schedule change policy five times they finally settled on that if your flight was changed by more six hours you’d receive a voucher and if the voucher isn’t used for 12 months they would provide you with a refund, basically giving themselves a fee free loan for 12 months.
When it comes to award flights even on flights that United had cancelled they were still trying to charge customers a redeposit fee of $50 to get their miles back. Keep in mind people couldn’t actually take these flights as United had cancelled them but United still wanted some money anyway. United is now doing the right thing (I’m not even sure you can call it the right thing. It’s really the only thing they can do if they don’t want to actively steal from their own loyal customers) and no longer charging this fee according to Dans Deals. If you’ve already paid this fee because your miles were being held hostage you can try calling United to get a refund, if that doesn’t work then filing a complaint with the DoT is probably your best bet.
I think this corona virus situation is telling consumers a lot about individual companies and how they treat their customers. I just hope people are smart enough to remember this when the good times come back around.
