When booking award travel, confirm your credit card gets charged immediately

My specific problem was that I had booked an itinerary that included a CopaAir flight through United MileagePlus, and the CopaAir portion went from “ticketing in progress” state to being dropped from the itinerary completely.

Turns out that my credit card wasn’t working for some reason, so United’s credit department was basically blocking the ticketing of my trip. The solution was to try a different credit card and confirm the charges went through. After that not only did it show up as ticketed in United, but it also showed up as ticketed in CopaAir and I was able to select seats on the CopaAir website.

What made this difficult to solve was poor communication between United departments, CopaAir, and with me. There was zero proactive communication that there was an issue, not even an email telling me the CopaAir flight had been dropped. I was lucky I had checked on the itinerary a few days later. In addition, the second time I called United, the agent wasn’t aware of the credit card being a problem and so they told me the issue was likely not enough award seats on the CopaAir flight and to call CopaAir to confirm seat availability. My first call to CopaAir was not very helpful, the CA agent just kept telling me the reservation had expired, but not why it had expired, nor whether there were award seats. The third time I called United, the agent just re-added the CopaAir flight only to have it be dropped again a few days later. In my second call to CopaAir, the agent provided more information, which was helpful: the reservation was being cancelled because the third-party booker (United) needed to pay for the ticket within 24 hours and they were not doing that, so the reservation expired. Finally, in my fourth call to United, the agent took the time to call one or two different departments, including the credit department, discovered they were not completing ticketing because of an issue with my credit card, and said that we could try the credit card again but he couldn’t guarantee it would work. I suggested using a different credit card, a United MileagePlus Explorer card, he said he could do that. When we tried the Explorer card, I saw the pending charge happen immediately, something that had not happened with any of the previous calls, and the ticketing completed within an hour or so. The agent spent 2 hours on this final call with me, and although that is a significant amount of both of our time, I was grateful to finally have all flights ticketed, and at a cheaper rate than if I had paid cash.

So when booking award travel, make sure you see the expected charges (taxes/fees) hit your credit card within 24 hours of booking your flight. If you don’t, there might be an issue with the credit card you gave the airline.