As you may remember I had a problem with my flights with Air New Zealand crediting to United.
Recap:
I flew London Heathrow to Los Angeles on a revenue business class ticket with Air New Zealand. I credited this to my United Airlines MileagePlus account where it should have earned 1.5 status miles and credits as well as 1.5 redeemable miles.
The outbound credited OK:
The return did not credit properly:
Later the earning changed again (and not in my favour):
Communications with United:
I initially contacted United on 9 October and they replied on 2 November as follows:
Dear Mr. MilesFromBlighty:
I just spoke with the MileagePlus Service Center and was informed that
there has been issues with crediting the Air New Zealand flights. With
that being said, the representative I spoke with is submitting a manual
request for the appropriate mileage to be credited to your account. I
am told it should appear within the next 2 weeks. Approximate Award
Miles/PQM’s will be 8174, with 1.5 PQS’s, plus the bonus miles of 5449.
Regards,
Corporate Customer Care
I wrote again and on 26 November I received this reply:
Hello MilesFromBlighty:
We’re always glad to hear from Premier 1K members like you. Thanks for writing.
We are hoping that Air New Zealand will correct this problem by the end of the year. If not, please contact MileagePlus towards the end of December so we can manually fix your account.
Thanks for your loyalty.
Regards,
MileagePlus
And so last week I wrote again and am now told:
Hello MilesFromBlighty:
Thanks for your reply.
We were informed earlier this month that Air New Zealand will fix the miles in mid-January. At this time, I am not able to process the correction.
Thanks for your loyalty.
Regards,
Tammy DeVries
MileagePlus
Outcome:
Now, I am lucky the MileagePlus account shows 102,754 PQM’s for the year so my 1K status is confirmed. Imagine if it showed less than 100k, with me needing the 8,184 miles to re-earn status, all at the whim of a third party airline! That would make it a tense time.
Consequence for United:
My end of year PQM should have been 110,938 and I would have pushed to earn 125,000 in order to earn a couple of extra Regional Upgrades – but with the prospect of earning nothing if United/Air New Zealand fail to fix the problem then why take the risk.
I realise that these are #FirstWorldProblems but if we play the mileage game then my feeling is that it ought to be on a level playing field.
UA may have resolved any operational issues with its planes that we saw over the summer, but they still have some op issues to resolve with its backend systems.
We are still waiting for our charter PQMs from the SMD4, and it’s driving certain people crazy. It actually looks like they attempted to post them but it was incorrectly “programmed” as the line item says PQM = 0. Mind you that they did charter a 787 for us and got to do cool background tours, but this is also a Frequent Flyer Junkie group that you are trying to win over (for those who are not UA loyalists) OR trying to keep.
Having things like crediting the charter flight to your MileagePlus account should be relatively quick and simple (and be done within a few days with a few extra people). Yet it sounds like either #1 their systems are so complex that the operators/agents/etc do not know what they are doing OR #2 they are just understaffed/overworked.
Small (but important) issues like these definitely does not win over Frequent Flyer nerds/geeks like me!
I’d always set my status making trip before dec 15 in case of posting errors and what not
Maybe I have had particular bad luck since the summer, but of my 7 segments since September 1, 4 have been cancelled or delayed by 2+ hours. So I’m not convinced that the operational issues have been fully resolved.
I had one flight all year delayed my more than two hours (and it worked very much to my benefit as I was able to extract another 2K miles from a mileage run) out of my ~70 flights on UA/UAX this year.