A Vacation Lost

I'm writing about this because I still feel so incredulous that this happened. Back in October I purchased tickets for the 3 of us to fly to Austin, Texas to visit friends. We were all so excited about this, and we were going to fly out today for a long weekend. I've never been to Austin, and was really curious as to what it is like.

But then in January Mike went to Alaska at the last minute, and there was no way he could do that AND take more time off from his job for the Texas trip in such a short span of time, so we decided we'd have to postpone the Texas trip. Big mistake. I called United Airlines, and tried to work with the agent to change our tickets to a month or so later. I was informed that there was a $150 change fee per ticket for this. What the heck!?! United was basically asking us to pay $450 in addition to the $650 we already paid for the tickets simply to change them to another weekend, with the exact same departure and arrival times. Uhh... no. We simply do not have $450 laying around to spend. And canceling the ticket? United gets to keep $150 per ticket as a service fee! And then if we want to use the remaining $67 per ticket, then we have to still pay $150 change fee, effectively slapping an additional $83 onto the price of whatever new ticket we buy. Is this twisted logic, or what? Whatever happened to paying the very reasonable price of $50 to change a ticket??

So thanks, United, for robbing us of a vacation and $650 hard-earned dollars. You suck. Flying the friendly skies? I think not.