nicknack

Same thing happened to me, and they told me the same. This is a whole NEW computer problem that people are just beginning to wake up to. I booked my trip 3/17, and I thought I'd avoid the first computer catastrophe. In fact, I've been checking my reservation once a week since, and it was fine until the past few days. I was told they suddenly lost 22,000 bookings, and it's not clear they know who they are until the individual flyers call up with problems. They said it might be a few weeks until they fix my reservation since I don't fly until later in the year and therefore I was not a "priority."

MBS MillionMiler

My throat finally cleared up for me to call...After 45 mins with a GREAT agent (HNL based, of course), nothing was resolved. Her answers and approach was a little different...She said she talked to a supervisor in HOU who said that three different departments are working on the problem, and they expect individual PNRs to be auto-fixed starting in about 48 hours.

I doubt it will happen this way. (My lack of confidence is not in the agent, but with anyone at management actually telling the truth or being aware of what's really going on).

romadaro

I have the same problem. Our tickets to Honolulu for Christmas have been lost. When I attempt to view the reservation I get an error message. I just got off the phone with the Premier line and she read me a memo that 14,000 tickets were corrupted during some type of migration that they were doing this weekend. According to the memo, the data has not been lost but it will take 3-4 days to restore the reservations. The memo says to advise passengers that everything is fine with their reservation and it can be accessed in the system, just not online. The agent told me that the memo just came out today and says NOT TO CALL IT because they are aware of the problem and phone calls will only delay the restoration process. So, her best advice was to keep checking and if the reservation still can't be viewed by the end of the week to call again since they clearly won't help today.

cozmo82

pretty unbelievable - crazy that everyone is having problems...

so the moral is - check your reservations, but don't call in? sure...

romadaro

I agree. If it's not one thing, it's another....when will it end?? I just checked my Honolulu reservation again and it's Day 2 and I'm still getting the error message. This is extremely discomforting! Why did it have to be the Hawaii flight?? I wouldn't be half as upset if it was my reservation to Cleveland!

bmvaughn

Believe this has more to do with Milepoint than UA

InHouseCounsel

The agent I got was great- took him about half hour, but he said the process was to issue a new reservation and that it would then sync with the ticket "in a few days". I was a bit surprised when I received the email with the ticket confirmed with the new locator number in about one hour.

Of course, online I now see both the old locator and the new one, so who knows what will happen when this alleged "re sweep" takes place.

tapeguy

I was checking on a future flight in July from LAX to EWR for me and my family when I got a message popup that said "Invalid Locator Record". I had booked this flight back in April for a family vacation and had the E+ seats setup and a whole roll for us.

I tried a few hours later with the mobile app and got the same error message so I called CS and related my problem. The CSR named Judy out of Honolulu had the same issue and her supervisor also did. The ticket numbers were in the system and valid but there was no locator number attached. Kind of a phantom ticket. She could pull up the ticket numbers and see they were issued but there were no seats assigned and no locator.

I was on the phone for an hour while she and the local IT rep for United rebuild the itinerary and assigned a new locator number. My seats had be given away so she reassigned a whole row on the other side of the plane in E+.

What really sets this apart is the phone call I received the following day in the morning telling me that she will personally follow this to make sure that the system doesn't screw this up again. She did warn me that I probably would not be able to check in online and would need to see an agent in LAX to get boarding passes.

Judy was very helpful and explained every step she and others were doing to try and fix this. She reminds me of the old United when customer service was the tops in the field.

Hopefully this is a sign of progress being made.

bseller

Apparently, the HouCrew has so far been unsuccesful in eliminating the customer focus that the HNL reservations staff is so good at.

I hope they fail miserably in their inevitable attempt to CO-ize HNL.

Dave

FLYDCA

An hour to repair something that should not have happened in the first place? Your definition of back is a bit broader than mine. Until the tools which the reps use to fix problems allow for more efficient service I'm not ready to declare victory.

edcho

I think that's actually called the customer experience.

I still have a terrible experience with both.

channa

+1

This is not the only computer hiccup that CO/UA has had in the past 3 months. Someone else posted that this "lost reservations" issue affected 20,000 reservations.

FinsUptechGuy

Every airline or big company is going to run into problems, the way they deal with said problems is how to judge a business. When I first started travelling for work 10 or so years ago I remember how impressed I was with how Delta handled missed connections. Most of the plane were going to miss the last connection at CVG, when I got off the plane there was a table setup that had plastic bags with each passengers name on it. In the bag were hotel and meal vouchers and your boarding pass for the next day. When the same thing happened to me on AA in Chicago, I had to go wait in a four hour line once I got off the plane.

This is the reason I won't fly an airline like Spirit for example. It is cheap and great when you leave on time, but if there are a few weather delays or cancellations don't plan on getting help or going anywhere quick.

Over the last 5 or 6 years since moving back to the NYC area I did most of my travel on CO. I always found them to be the best when there were problems, of course since the merger a lot of extra problems have come up. I have hope that these are growing pains, and once the number of issues comes back to the normal everyday stuff that the level of service we receive will become better as well.

LilAbner

The OP is new and therefore this post is not in any way meant to criticize his theory that Customer Service is coming back!

In the past several days as many as 22,000 reservations disappeared from UA system, and apparently the OP had one of them. An hour to rebuild this record is not something to write home about, nor is it a change for the better.

Again, the OP was taken care of by a nice res agent and for that he is grateful, but there are 21,999 others that still are without itineraries that they paid for in the coming months. I'll reserve my "Standing O" for a system that doesn't crap out almost every other day/week!

MBS MillionMiler

Already reported here:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...servation.html

With mixed results as to having the reservation fixed. (Mine was NOT, despite a great agent in HNL who contacted HOU and they told her not to do anything with it, that it will fix itself in '48 hours or so').