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Awhile ago, I bartered with a friend of mine.  She watched our kids for a weekend when we went to Puerto Rico, and in exchange, I’d use my miles to book her a roundtrip ticket anywhere in the US.  We’ve had a few stops and starts but last night I finally was able to actually book her ticket.  She is heading to Boston over Thanksgiving and given the holiday weekend, fares were pretty expensive.

Thankfully (pun alert!) I was able to find saver award availability on the dates she was looking for (she is flying back on Saturday rather than Sunday or she’d have been out of luck).  We had to book this flight as an open jaw flight (CVG-BOS; MHT-CVG), because the only availability coming back from Boston was too early.

(SEE ALSO: What is an open jaw flight? Or a stopover? Layover? What’s the difference?)

The flight out of Manchester is a connecting flight and is still early, but a little more convenient for her schedule

Booking a Delta flight with Air France

There is saver availability showing on Delta.com, so you can see the flight on Air France’s website

air-france-manchester-availability

All looks good until I got to the confirmation page, where it deducted 25,000 miles for the flight!

air-france-deducting-twice-miles

You can see that the outbound leg (direct flight from Cincinnati to Boston) correctly deducted 12,500 miles for a one-way economy flight but on the 2nd flight (from Manchester back to Cincinnati via Detroit) I was charged 25,000 miles

I actually had a bit of a “uh-oh” feeling when I saw the 25,000 mile amount that I had somehow screwed something up (SEE ALSO: The worst feeling in the world: Screwing up a travel booking) but when I went back I saw that not only was the flight listed at 12,500 miles, there were still seats available at 12,500 miles.  I screenshotted and prepared to call in

Calling Flying Blue

I found the US number for Flying Blue which was for some reason alphabetized under B for “Bermuda / Canada / United States” and after a brief hold spoke to someone who addressed me as Carolyn. 🙂

Thankfully he didn’t make my wife get on the phone (it was her account) because OH BOY does she love talking to banks and airlines! I gave him my record locator and after a few minutes, he came back on the line and said that he saw the problem, had sent it to the right department and that I should have my miles back in 48 hours (they’re actually already back in the account)

I asked what had happened and I THINK he said (there was a bit of a language barrier) that sometimes the system charges double the amount for connecting flights.

Has anyone else ever been double charged when redeeming Flying Blue miles?


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