The Michael W Travels family recently returned home from our Spring Break trip to Argentina and Uruguay a couple of days late.
I wrote about what happened in the post, AA Flight Cancelled, No Flight For 2 Days- Who Pays For Hotel?
Due to our flight being canceled, rather than arrive home on a Friday night, we didn’t get home until Sunday evening. (We should’ve been home around 3:00 PM, but our connecting flight was delayed due to mechanical issues…)
Besides getting a day to spend in St Louis, there was one other (minor) benefit that we received due to our flight delay.
We were originally flying home on an American Airlines award so our flights would not earn miles. When our STL-LGA flight got canceled, I was able to get us home on United Airlines.
I logged into my United Airlines account a few days later and saw this under Recent MileagePlus activity.
Due to our AA flight cancellation, we were able to earn United miles on our two flights home. While the miles weren’t much, I guess it’s better than nothing.
For this major inconvenience, I earned 991 miles.
No, spending money for two nights of hotel stays wasn’t worth it for this little, unexpected bonus.
I am surprised you haven’t explored travel insurance or what coverage is provided on your credit card. We would have missed half our spring break due to an AA weather cancellation (and the inability of AA to rebook us for 72 hours) but we had travel insurance. So we bought new tickets on Delta that got us to our destination only 24 hours late. Travel insurance checks have already been processed for my out of pocket costs, including $5600 on plane tickets, airport hotel and our meals during the delay period. This is the first time I used travel insurance but I believe I will be booking regularly going forward – our trip would not have been the experience we wanted if we missed half of it.