Why you might want to book travel through Expedia.com

For most of my flights, I use miles. It is, by far, the best value for hard earned miles. But sometimes, it just doesn't make sense to use miles and instead you need to pay cash. For example, my daughter who is headed to college in the fall wanted to come home for Thanksgiving break. Even though it was May when we started looking at flights, the cheap award seats were already long gone.
So I looked at buying a flight on United so she would earn miles towards a free flight to use sometime in the next four years.
Now Thanksgiving flights are expensive, but I found one for $745. Ouch! But I knew the price would just go up and we didn't have many options so I booked it through Expedia.com. 
Fast forward to this past week, my daughter decided that she no longer wanted to come home for Thanksgiving. Probably due to hanging out with us in Europe for 3 weeks. Ah, life with teens. United's cancellation and change policy is subject to a $200 penalty. Ouch, again!
I was still deciding my best course of action when I recieved this notice from Expedia.com.

When I checked the United flight that I had booked, I noticed they changed not only the time of the flight, but also the connecting flights and cities.
Now when I booked this flight, I chose to have my daughter fly through Washington DC instead of Chicago due to possible weather issues.
They had rerouted her through Chicago.
Within a few hours, I received a second notice.

The representative could not have been nicer on the phone. She understood the issue and conferenced in a reprsentative from United. We went through several alternative flight combinations, but nothing would work with my daughter's schedule, preferred connection and the holidays.
Since we couldn't find a satisfactory flight, United agreed to cancel this flight and return the money with no penalty.
The only downside is that Expedia says it will take 8 weeks to see the refund back to my credit card. Seems excessive to me, but it didn't cost me $200 and the new December flight will actually cost $200 less so it's a win as long as I actually get my promised refund.
Kudos to Expedia.com!