Originally Posted by
eghansen
Your situation is completely different from OP's. You were in a situation where it was likely you would misconnect. Your family was in a situation where it was a 100% probability they would misconnect. When I worked for Continental, we always double-booked to protect misconnects.
In OP's case, he wanted a double-booking to protect himself from a flight that might possibly cancel and in the end did not. It was never OK to double book in that case.
I always take the experiences of FTers with a grain of salt. What United will do for 1Ks is a far cry from what they will do for the other 99% of us.
In general, reservation agents can do anything the want on the computer. However, airlines regularly run compliance scripts that look for reservations that violate company policy. A reservation agent can be confronted days later asking him/her why they did something they were not supposed to. That the passenger was 1k would probably be a sufficient reason to something that violated company policy.
If a reservation agent gets too many instances of violating company policy on their record, they are fired.
I was addressing that the agent was telling him you can't be on two flights in my case as in both the cases I described people were booked on both flights.
FWIW I would have made the SFO-MRY flight but my bags missed the cut off so I rented a car and drove. My parents also made the last LAX-MRY flight with about 15 min to spare.
But when I went back and read what the OP noted I do see how an agent could/should/would be hesitant to book someone who is already on a plane in case of MX/CX on a later flight that day.