My wife and I are having trouble getting mileage credit from United for a trip we took in May to China on Air China, one of their Star Alliance partners.

United keeps refusing our requests, saying that Air China cannot verify our presence on the flights we listed. We filed all our requests in a timely manner, giving name(s), ticket #, seat #, flight#, etc....

What, if anything, can we do about this? This is beginning to feel like a deliberate attempt to deny us miles. I think they figure we will just give up once denied.

I just refiled our requests with United, asking them to tell Air China to search for us using our passport names (with our middle names fully spelled out), not our mileage plus names which are identical except uses a middle initial. United customer service did not think this was the problem, but went ahead anyway.

Advice?