[JochenS]

Hello everybody,

I wanted to share my recent experience with United Airlines.
My family and I have 4 travel certificates each valued at $150. These were issued to us earlier this year when we had to cancel another flight.

Now we were planning a trip to Europe and intended to use these travel vouchers towards that trip. So we went online to find a suitable trip and put it on hold.
Realizing that it is not possible to use the vouchers online we called customer service to find out if and how these vouchers could be applied. Customer service confirmed on the phone that we could use the vouchers, but we would have to go to the airport for that.
At this point I admit a mistake; we just believed the phone rep even though the vouchers did say on them they are valid for travel on United only and our trip included a segment operated by Lufthansa.
However, the phone rep had confirmed the vouchers could be used so we drove all the way to the airport (almost 1 hour each way).

At the airport counter we found out that the vouchers could not be used, for the reason already mentioned.

We were disappointed but nevertheless decided to book the trip.

So the airline employee continued processing our booking.
It was not until the booking was completed and she handed over our tickets, when she mentioned that she had just charged us an additional $120 processing fee (4x $30) for booking at the airport counter.

Never in the world would we go to the airport counter to book a trip in the first place, waste an entire afternoon driving and waiting in line, had we not been advised from the phone rep. to do so.

Never would we have purchased the trip at the counter, had we been told that there would be an additional fee.

I did email customer relations already and received the answer basically that it is our fault because the voucher did say on them them United only and also they can't make any exceptions on the processing fee.