Originally Posted by
chollie
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.
FYI This is not just between UA/CA. AC also has the same issue. I was denied boarding on a "confirmed" tix which AC Reservations insisted was confirmed and looked good to go. The CA agent showed me her screen that showed my booking OPEN in that specific segment even though two other CA segments before and after were showing confirmed as well as the AC segments which were the first and last. Ended up buying a full Y tix to board the flight and was advised by AC to call back to deal with the refund of the one-way tix later when travel had finished.