boilers

The website told me to contact United for my flight tomorrow. I waited on the phone yet customer service said there was nothing they could do. Really nice of them to put to call, wait on the phone then be told there was nothing they could do. Thus, I recommend waiting and checking at the airport.

michelle227

may be worth trying again...I was getting the same message at T-24 and still at T-23 this morning. However, now it lets me check in online. Had to laugh at their attempt to upsell to first for almost twice what the upgrade was showing earlier today. The new United random number generators have a funny sense of humor...

djohannw

Bringing this thread back up - I had this coming up all day today through mobile website, App and classic website when trying to checkin for my return to Europe for tomorrow. I see that the last reports I found on this message date back to the merger, however I get this today...is there anything I should be worried about? I am traveling with family and have no seat reservation for one leg...which was the reason why I wanted to check in as early as possible to get seats together on that segment.

Any feedback would be very much appreciated - since I have quite some drive to get to the departure airport I cannot make it there until about 90 minutes before my flight...any experience with this message would be very much appreciated!

Greetings - Dirk

exerda

Could be a couple of things in your situation. First, UA may want to see your passports (even if you've used them before on UA); for some reason, SHARES seems to want more frequent passport verification than ought to be necessary. Second, there may not be any seats open for assignment yet--not necessarily oversold or anything, but just that the rest are blocked until closer to check-in.

Regardless, for international travel, I would be concerned at not being checked in until T-90, particularly without seat assignments. If there's any way to get to the airport earlier, I'd do so.

djohannw

FWIW, I solved my problem and am now checked in for all segments. Reason for my problem was that my daughter's passport-number contains a blank and was read correctly (i.e. including this blank) during our outbound-flight's checkin. However UAs online-tools consider a blank in the passport-number as an invalid character and will not allow you to enter that - since I had used the stored data from the inbound, however, that blank caused united.com to "hickup". Reentering the passport-data without the blank did the trick to allow us to checkin - just need to remember to have her passport scanned again at the airport to correct the passport-data in the "real" system.

That said in addition to still having no seat assignments on one segment (but now being checked in for that), this also came up for this very flight:

Looks like we will be facing a hard time trying to sit together. This is certainly a change vs. 2012 right after the cutover to shares when in a similar situation we were automatically assigned E+ seats which currently are available...

Greetings - Dirk

valor155

So it was IT all along. Okay, that's solved.

When I travel with my family, we have an infant, and Infant In Arms seems to require "Special Handling".

But just for the sake of full disclosure, 2 of the 3 times we've done that, UA rep at the desk basically said, "Why are you checking in here? You can do infant in arms online."

That's true, but when you make that designation, we always get a "special handling" case. That's fine and not a big deal. UA just should train their reps to be in sync with how their systems work. Not asking too much.

gokeeper

Came across this situation today when I was trying to check a domestic flight: Your reservation requires special handling. Please check in at an airport kiosk.
Called premier desk and they can't check me in either, just told me to go to the airport earlier, could this because I enrolled TSA pre check on .bomp recently?

Ari

No.

milepig

I fear you've been SSSS'd.

gokeeper

Ouch, hope not...let's see what will happen tomorrow..

PVDProf

I had this on a completely standard domestic trip last month. No SSSS, and I am trusted traveler. The only explanation I got was that "they changed the planes a few weeks ago." Of course, I'd only bought my ticket one week ahead of time, and seen no plane changes as I was monitoring my seat. But it seemed like they were expecting a lot of agent interactions for that one flight.

gokeeper

Weird...I bought the ticket 10.10, 1 month before travel, no equipment change noticed. However, I found my first leg became F0 Y0, and potentially overbooked, maybe...

gokeeper

OK, at the airport 1 hour before flight, the checkin agent spend about 5 min to get my BPs. When first TSA agent scanned my BP the machines beeped and then he show me to TSA pre check line, it's my first time using pre check so maybe this is the reason?

Mike Jacoubowsky

I had a message for my rather-complex MR itin, that said I couldn't use OLCI and had to see an agent at the airport. I called and the call center couldn't figure it out, they thought maybe it was a random screening thing, but they sent me over to web support, who also couldn't figure it out. I got to the airport, used the Easy Check-In... no problem. Who knows. Could have had something to do with being an MR and having just a 1hr connection at the return point? Maybe that flags you for special processing? But if so, there wasn't any, at least not at my check-in point. I did get some stares and questions down the road though. Fortunately, immigrations folk now seem to understand what a mileage run is.

nickab

Just got this trying to check in for an international itinerary departing tomorrow. I'm a trusted traveler / Global Entry.

On OLCI, I got a prompt for TSA secure flight information (DOB, which ID was I going to use, known traveler number). This is weird because all this information is already in my reservation. On completing the form, I was given the "Your reservation requires special handling. Please check in at an airport kiosk."

Called UA, and of course they had no idea. The agent did say that a few people with international itineraries called in today with the same message, so it sounds like it's a system-wide issue with UA's TSA/DHS OLCI wiring. In the past on interline itineraries, I've been able to get through the check-in process and be sent a boarding pass that says "THIS IS NOT A BOARDING PASS." That didn't happen this time -- I was kicked out of the check-in process after the TSA secure flight info page.

Crossing my fingers that this doesn't lead to an "SSSS"!