I'm not sure what else there is to say about the ethics of this mistake award offer. Maybe discussion of this topic should be suspended at this point?
Meanwhile, I AM interested in 2 very important topics that are getting drowned out by the ethics banter. First, what about the travellers who are flying on these tickets and, I assume, the many more who are about to depart? Perhaps there should be a separate thread devoted to this very important topic?
Second, why is it taking UA so long to actually do ANYTHING about the mistake tickets? We're at about 60 hours from the fact now and that's a crazy amount of time for UA to leave this thing hanging. Nobody would think the note from Shannon was sufficient, especially since the tickets are still currently valid and folks are presumably using them every day.