Clients Recover $500K in United Airlines Unused Ticket Value

Redeeming unused ticket credits with one click in AmTrav is a great way to save money on business travel -- but don't you wish you could just get a refund?

Well, earlier this year United Airlines offered a rare chance to refund unused tickets, allowing companies to get their money back really fast on tickets sold by travel management companies like AmTrav. This is a big deal!

That announcement kicked off a multi-month, multi-step process at AmTrav to help clients get their refunds. The United refund offer is a little complicated, so we set out to reduce that complexity for clients:

Step one: Explain the offer in a Knowledge Base article to help clients understand the key details of it. This way clients can make fully-informed decisions, recognizing and avoiding potential problems as they consider the refund offer. For example, United will only send refunds back to the original form of payment, so if your travelers pay for travel using personal cards and you’ve already reimbursed them, you’ll need a way to get that reimbursement back if you refunded these tickets!

Step two: We tested our refund offer messaging and explanation by offering the refunds to a dozen select clients. Several said “yes please,” which was great. But even better, we improved the Knowledge Base article and refunds offer email based on their responses and questions.

Step three: Back to the drawing board. One of the key asks from clients was simple -- “how much can I get back?” So we teamed up with AmTrav’s analytics team to apply United’s refund rules to our unused tickets data, removing any ineligible tickets and estimating the refund penalty so we could confidently say, for example, “you can refund these 10 tickets for $5,000 net of United’s penalty.”

Step four: Having developed, tested and improved our explanation to clients, it’s go time! For the past month-plus we’ve sent clients the refund offer email, personalized with their company’s eligible refund amount, and processed their refunds.

So what about the results? Our clients love this refund offer. Over two-thirds of clients have said “yes please!” and collectively refunded over $500,000 in unused United tickets (and counting!).

We’re thrilled. This refund process isn’t easy for us, but our clients rely on AmTrav to get the full value of their business travel, so we jump at any opportunity to make our clients' lives easier and reduce the cost of their business travel.

At AmTrav we are ready to help: you are supported when and where you need it -- we’ve got your back. Whether that’s helping you get home despite a canceled flight at midnight or getting your money back on unused tickets, we’re always looking for opportunities to drive your travel productivity.