These 8 Airline Errors and Mishaps Can Score You FREE Points and Miles

On a nine-hour flight from Milan, Italy, to Chicago’s O’Hare on United Airlines, my seat-back screen never fired up despite attempts by the flight attendants to reboot. The two rows in front of me and behind me were also affected. We were each offered—while still in flight—either a $250 airline voucher or 5,000 United Airlines miles. While a broken seatback screen also means you have no reading light—unless your seatmate’s girlfriend on the other side of the cabin lends you her headlamp, true story—at least you have a future trip to look forward to.

So that cute couple on their honeymoon wants to sit together but their assigned seats are, well, not even remotely close. I have observed a flight attendant wander the plane asking solo travelers to switch seats—and the first one to accept the offer got either airline miles or a flight credit. If you’re flying alone and don’t have a seat preference, this is a small act of kindness. In many cases, you’ll still get that window or aisle seat, just in a different row.

This happened to a friend of mine who was flying from Washington D.C. to London on business and hoped to catch some zzzs. Until, oops. The seat did not recline and he realized he’d be sleeping sitting upright. The airline gave him a future airline credit for this obvious discomfort on an overnight flight.

While my pescatarian diet is more flexible than, say, gluten-free or vegan, there’s a reason I pre-order meals on transatlantic flights. On an American Airlines flight home to the States from Rome, my vegetarian-meal request hadn’t been logged. Because many on my flight were sick of pasta after traveling in Italy, this allowed me to snag a pasta (instead of chicken) meal off the cart. But American Airlines did give me 12,500 miles for this mishap (which included unexpectedly spending the night in Charlotte, North Carolina).

If a plane is sitting at the gate or the runway or—on a recent flight I took from Nashville to Chicago O’Hare—has to log extra miles to bypass a storm, this means you’ll likely miss your connecting flight. Especially if said layover is less than an hour to begin with. This creates a major travel mess that originated while you were on the plane—and could not avoid. Ask for reimbursement in the form of miles or a voucher.

A travel-writer colleague was really looking forward to writing an assigned story on an American Airlines flight from Rome to Philadelphia after traveling for 10 days in Europe. Until the discovery that the Wi-Fi was not working. Wait, what? Since the length of that flight is equivalent to a normal work day, that’s considered an unexpected day off. She wrote to American Airlines and they deposited miles in her account.

In the airline industry, there’s such a thing as a flight crew being “timed out.” Pilots and flight attendants are only authorized to work so many consecutive hours to ensure they get enough rest. With flight schedules so air-tight, if a flight is delayed, it can cause the crew’s working “day” to screech to a halt, and a new flight crew must be located. This can take time. For an American Airlines flight from Charlotte to Milwaukee, we were seated on the plane and ready to take off—sans pilot. A replacement pilot could not be found in time, and the flight rebooked for the next morning with a new crew. I wrote to the airline and received 12,500 miles.

Delays can occur in refueling or loading passengers’ bags and the flight can’t leave without doing these two tasks. If the pilots don’t make up the time in the air, you will now be missing your connecting flight in a layover city. On a Delta Air Lines flight from Atlanta to Paris, I looked out the window to see we were taxing back to the gate from the runway—and not in the air as planned. A bag in cargo belonged to someone not on the plane. They probably changed their travel plans or missed their connection, but to be safe, the bag had to be removed. Now the arrival time in Paris was pushed back, causing some to miss their connections. If I’d been more savvy, I would have written to the airline and they likely would have deposited miles in my SkyMiles account as I was a loyal customer and not too happy to see this delay due to negligence while boarding bags.