We’d had this trip planned for months. A sunny few days in Tenerife with a two-day stop in London at the beginning and a one-day stop in Madrid at the end.
The long-haul flights from Moline to London and Madrid to Moline were on American Airlines and booked with AA miles. We got a tremendous deal on the flights from Moline to London for 19,000 AA miles and $5.60 each, for four people. The flight home was a good but not great price, costing 34,000 AAdvantage Miles and $50 each. We also booked award flights on British Airways from London to Tenerife and Tenerife to Madrid on Iberia Airlines.
Everything looked great, and we were ready to go, but a couple of months prior, American Airlines had moved the first leg of our flight to London forward two hours which meant that the comfortable 3 hour layover in Chicago was now a nerve racking hour and seven minute layover.
Jenn and I considered moving our first leg of the flight to an earlier flight, but that would have left us with a six hour layover in Chicago and we thought “you know, let’s just trust the airline this time, as long as the weather is fine, that’s an easy enough connection.”
The Weather Was, in Fact, Not Fine
We live in the Midwest. We know better. There is no such thing as “fine” weather, especially in March. It’s 5 degrees one day, 70 degrees the next. It’s also constantly rainy, windy, and occasionally, we get the dreaded March blizzard.
About a week before our trip, our local meteorologist started talking about a storm coming up. He was predicting strong winds and maybe an inch of snow. As the week progressed, the forecast progressively got worse, and we were looking at the prospect of attempting to fly out of our local airport with sideways snow accumulating in the 5 to 8 inch range.
Moline does not have a great reputation for on-time flights, so our 1-hour layover now looked impossible. We needed options. What I was hoping for was either a longer layover or a different route that got us around the storm. I searched every way I could think of and couldn’t come up with a good alternative.
I took about a day to try to figure something out and the forecast kept getting worse, so we finally thought “what if we drove to Chicago the day before and just took the Moline to Chicago legs off of our flights?” That way, no matter what, we wouldn’t miss the flight from Chicago to London. Sounds great, but we’ll have to call American Airlines to do that.
We called and they answered the phone almost immediately. We explained the situation to the customer service representative. She responded that she could rebook us from Chicago to London, and that would cost 30,000 points.
Wait – what? I’m going to give you 4 seats back, that you can sell, or potentially use for other passengers who might be impacted by the storm, and you want me to pay an additional 11,000 AAdvantage miles per person to do it?
I barely had enough points to do it, but that also means that I would have to change our flights back since my truck would be in Chicago, and we definitely didn’t have enough AAdvantage miles to change both. I knew we could skiplag on the way home and just get off in Chicago, but it’s frowned upon, and I didn’t want to piss off American Airlines.
We talked about it and decided that, since we were willing to drive to Chicago, we should look into whether we could get flights from Chicago to London on United Airlines. Jenn checked the United app and saw that saver-level fares were available for a little over 38,000 United miles. That’s great, but I knew if there were saver-level fares available on United, then they might be available on Singapore Airlines as a partner award. I preferred to use Singapore Airlines to book, because they generally have cheaper prices on United flights to Europe and they have a lot of transfer partners.
The Singapore Airlines Nominee Problem
I checked the Singapore Airlines website and, sure enough, there were the same flights available for only 32,500 Singapore Miles instead of 38,000 United miles. Great – we then transferred 130,000 miles from American Express Membership Rewards to Singapore to book the flights. I then tried to book the flights and ran into a problem. It was Jenn’s Singapore Airlines account, and I could add Emma and Jenn, but there wasn’t any way to add me and Alex.
It was strange. Why could I only choose from a dropdown instead of just filling out the passenger information? Jenn called customer service, and they said that we needed to add “nominees” (Emma was already a nominee for Jenn’s account because they booked a trip together last summer using Singapore). Ok, fine, it’s weird they do it that way, but sure. Jenn added Alex and me to the nominees and then tried again to book it. She still couldn’t choose us. Jenn called back to customer service, and they told her that she couldn’t add nominees for flights within 72 hours – we were looking at a flight 52 hours in the future. You’ve got to be kidding me.
At this point, I was getting pretty frustrated, but we decided to book Emma and Jenn using Singapore Airlines, since we had already transferred the points, and Alex and I would have to book the same flights using United miles.
The United Mileage Pool Problem
We’ve had around 13,000 United miles in a family pool for a while now. We needed a total of 76,000 miles to book Alex and me on the same flight to London that Jenn and Emma were now on. So I transferred 63,000 Chase Ultimate Reward points to United and then added them to the family pool.
Now I just needed to book the flight. I chose the flight and then went to check out and got the error “You do not have enough miles to book this flight.” What? Why? I poked around for a while, and it said that pooled miles were not available for this flight. I’m sorry, what? No explanation as to why, just that I couldn’t use the miles for this flight, and a link to the terms and conditions so I could sift through all of the carefully written legal language for the rule that applied in this case.
I was at the end of my rope; I just needed to get this flight booked. I was frustrated because I had moved points over to the family pool, and I wasn’t sure if I could get them out of the pool to use them immediately, and I had already stranded 65,000 Amex Ultimate Reward points on Singapore Airlines since Alex and I weren’t nominees on Jenn’s account.
I did some searching and found out that I could reverse a move to a points pool within 24 hours, so I reversed the move and transferred an additional 13,000 Chase Ultimate Reward Points to United, which gave me enough points outside of the points pool to book the flight.
Frustrations with Loyalty Programs
At the end of all of this, I was frustrated, angry, and frankly disappointed in each of these loyalty programs. Every problem I experienced trying to fix a problem with the weather was created by an unnecessary rule. For most of these, I don’t even understand why the rule exists in the first place, let alone why you would put your customers (and customer service representatives) through this.
American Airlines – Dynamic Pricing Demands More Flexible Customer Service
For American Airlines, you put out a travel alert for our flight. You knew the weather was going to be bad. When we explained to the customer service representative what we were attempting to do and why, she completely understood. She talked to her supervisor to explain the situation, but still couldn’t do anything about it without having to rebook.
If you are going to have dynamic pricing, then you cannot expect people to rebook at higher prices later if there is a weather emergency. It would be one thing if we decided that we wanted to change our flights and there were no weather issues, but that wasn’t the case. You declared a travel alert, but then were too narrow in what we could do to address the weather issues. And we weren’t even trying to get on a flight that we hadn’t booked – we just didn’t want to take one of the legs of the flight. We couldn’t have made it easier on you. They still couldn’t accommodate the simplest of requests.
Singapore Airlines – The Nominee System is Terrible
For Singapore Airlines, what are you doing with this nominee system? This is utterly insane. I understand that you are probably trying to prevent people from selling your points, but if the account holder is literally flying on the same flight, then they’re not selling points, they’re just trying to get their family or friends on the same flight that they are on.
The nominee system is a complete waste of your IT staff and your customer service staff’s time. Just allow people to type in the information of the people who will be on the flight, like everyone else does. Also, if you are going to force a nominee system, then why in the world would you not allow someone to book within 72 hours? It makes no sense, and this is just an unnecessary rule that you are forcing your customer service representatives to know, explain, and enforce, while undoubtedly pissing off your customers.
United Airlines – Make Points Pooling Instantaneous
For United Airlines, can you make the points pooling useful? Making me wait 24 hours after pooling points is asinine. Like American Airlines, you use dynamic pricing, so if I move a certain number of points over to the points pool, there is no guarantee the price of that flight will be the same the next day. What if I move enough points over today and the price jumps by 5,000 points tomorrow, and then I move another 5,000 points, and then it changes the next day? You can’t have dynamic pricing and not allow me to use points immediately; that’s just going to lead to frustration, anger, and uncomfortable phone calls for your employees.
In addition, it would be nice if you could explain why I couldn’t use pooled points on a flight in the error and maybe tell me what I could do about it instead of just linking the terms and conditions. I literally didn’t know why I wasn’t able to book that flight until a week later when I had the time to really look into it.
We Saved the Trip
At the end of the day, we were able to make it work. The original flight from Moline to Chicago that we were trying to avoid got canceled, so had we not changed our plans, we would have been at the mercy of American Airlines to get us to London, at best, a day late. The issue with Singapore Airlines meant that we had 65,000 Amex Membership Rewards points stranded there, and the clock is ticking, since they now expire in 3 years.
I tried to rebook the flight from Madrid to Moline to Madrid to Chicago, but there weren’t really any available seats anywhere to make that work. We ended up having to skiplag the Chicago to Moline portion because, as we found out, there is no point in calling American Airlines customer service to let them know we won’t be using the last leg. I hated doing that, but we really had no options.
On the bright side, we landed in London about 4 hours earlier than we would have on the American Airlines flight, and every other part of the trip was the same. Having points in multiple programs allowed us to move around what we needed to and book a workable flight. As frustrating as all of this was, it was less frustrating than being stuck because of the snowstorm and missing out on a portion, or all, of our vacation. I’ve heard this many times, and it turned out to be true – always be proactive when you are traveling, and make sure that you stay out in front of any issues, especially weather problems.
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