My Proposed Flight Itinerary For My Dream Brazil Trip:
I had 2 weeks of time between jobs to take a vacation, and with it being such a last minute decision, it was stressful. I was all over the google flight search engine, along with a couple of other ones such as United, Chase Ultimate Rewards, SouthWest till I had a trip I wanted in mind, and it was a trip that I’d have loved to go on – from Los Angeles to Rio De Janeiro.
It seemed like a dream come true at first. I had 2 weeks off, so a trip for 10 days would’ve been perfect. I know traveling such a far distance would take away 2 days in travel, but I didn’t mind. It was a dream trip that I’ve had for awhile, and to spend about a week of uninterrupted time in Rio would’ve been heavenly.
With the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, I had about 80,000 points to collectively transfer over into miles. When I was looking through Chase’s frequent flyer programs and see which program would match the flight itinerary I was stumbling on, I stumbled upon United’s. I thought the pieces of the puzzle all fit together, which never does, and was surprised. Round trip, the flight would’ve cost 67,000 miles!
I kept double checking and triple checking the flight itinerary to make sure the dates were all set, and transferred my Chase Ultimate Rewards points to United Airlines.
All set to go. From Los Angeles to Brazil for only 67,000 miles + $64.60. Not bad at all! Especially this for being such a last minute trip.
It was only till I had tried to go through with the flight that I got the following error:
This pissed me off immediately. I proceeded to call the phone number United provided me on the error message and inquired about my flight. I gave them the specific details of my flight, and was then told that I received the error because the of the key wording of “Operated By _____”. This essentially meant that the flight wasn’t available to be booked on United. What the hell?
I tried contacting both United & Chase to see if I could get my miles back to Ultimate Rewards after having them transferred over, but both parties have told me no, that points are a one way transaction. So, I’m stuck.
What Now?
I’m gonna leverage this situation with the points that I’ve already transferred over to United. I’m gonna sign up for the Chase Mileage Plus credit card ($0 intro fee, then $95 annual fee the following years), spend $3000 and receive 60,000 miles and have all of those accumulated miles for a fun trip in the future. United offers plenty of options from LAX, so I’m not too worried. I just want to make sure that I won’t get any errors in the future so I’ll need to be careful when navigating the website. No more complicated flights through United.
You guys had your chance.
Just going to suck up what I can from this deal and move on.
