Originally Posted by
alfrie
I had tickets issued by UA and US which included Air China segments. With the ticket numbers and passengers' names, I was able to pull out itineraries and payment information. Does that mean the tickets were validated? Not really.
I called Air China for further verification and things got interesting. CA could not find those reservations in its own system at all. I showed them the confirmation codes (not UA/US code, but CA codes given to me by UA/US), and was told the codes did not exist. Gave them the flight number/date and travelers' names, and was told the names were not on the passenger list. I had to go back to the ticket issuers (UA and US), had them cancel the tickets and built new reservations from scratch.
It seemed to me that Travelsky was linked to GDS, but not directly connected with those China-based airlines. If you want to be absolutely confirmed, you should call each individual airline and validate those segments on their own metal.
I had a similar problem a few weeks ago. I was trying to book a UA/CA itinerary on the UA website. Everything looked OK, I had a PNR for the CA flights, but ...after 4 calls to UA (and then finally a call to CA), it turned out that the CA flights were never booked. It is a known (but not widely) problem UA has with CA.
What actually happened (and they cancelled and rebooked my flights a couple times) was that a
request for flights was sent to CA with an invalid fare code. CA's system saw the request, found no matching availability on that flight
for that fare code, so CA waitlisted the request. In the meantime, UA took my money and generated an itinerary that looked no different than any other UA+other airlines itinerary I have booked in the past. During the 4th call with UA, I asked if they had tried calling CA - they hadn't. While I was on hold, I called CA on another line and found out what was going on.