When United rebooked us after our flight to Frankfurt went mechanical, it automatically refunded the Economy Plus seat we lost. But another seat charge quietly remained.
Before our original flight from Washington Dulles to Frankfurt, I paid CAD 178.50 for an Economy Plus seat for myself. For my wife Sharon, I paid CAD 83 for a Preferred seat in the middle section of the plane. I’m assuming United charged us in Canadian dollars because the flight was booked through Air Canada.
Why didn’t I also buy her an Economy Plus seat? She didn’t need the extra legroom, and the Preferred seat let us choose a location that worked for us without paying the higher Economy Plus price.
As I’ve written before, that flight developed a mechanical problem after takeoff and had to return to Dulles. United eventually rebooked us on a flight the following day, but we weren’t placed back in the seats we had purchased. In fact, we took almost the last seats available on that flight.
Not long after the trip, United automatically refunded what I had paid for my Economy Plus seat. That made sense. I had paid for extra legroom, and United didn’t provide it on the replacement flight.
Guess which charge wasn’t refunded?
The only explanation I can think of is that United’s system treated Sharon’s replacement economy seat as equivalent to the Preferred seat we had purchased. But that ignores the entire reason United charged us extra in the first place. If the location didn’t matter, there wouldn’t have been an additional CAD 83 fee.
Preferred seats don’t offer extra space or a different onboard experience. They’re regular economy seats that United charges more for because they’re in what it considers a better location, generally closer to the front of the cabin.
What makes this feel particularly sneaky is that I didn’t notice the missing refund until months later. The Economy Plus charge was refunded automatically, so I had no reason to examine any other part of the transaction.
It isn’t a huge amount of money, especially compared with everything else that went wrong on this trip. Still, if United moved Sharon out of the Preferred section during an involuntary rebooking, I think it should have automatically returned the Preferred seat fee.
What do you think? Did United provide what we paid for because Sharon still received an economy seat, or should the Preferred seat charge have been refunded?
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