Originally Posted by
mherdeg
Suppose I book a 3/15 award flight SFO-LAX then call UA and change to the 3/17. They'll revalidate (same e-ticket number) but they will change the departure date of the SFO-LAX sector on the ticket. Colloquially I think of myself as having a ticket on the 3/17 trip — and a "send me my e-ticket" e-mail from UA would agree. They have changed the data on their e-ticket and revalidated it.
This is FlyerTalk.com, not ColoquialTravelerTalk.com.
What data on the ETKT have they changed exactly? Not the NVB/NVA; the ticket is still valid only one year from the
original issue date. Not the origin or destination. Not the booking code. What has changed? Only the travel date. As you mention above, that can be handled by re-validation, which differs from re-issuance.
Originally Posted by
mherdeg
Or suppose I book a 3/15 award flight SFO-LAX-LAS with first sector in "I" and second sector in "X". I'll pay for a business-class award trip. If saver business opens up, I might call UA and change from "X" to "I". They'll revalidate (same e-ticket number) but they will change the fare class on the LAX-LAS sector to "I" to reflect that I'm now ticketed in business. Colloquially I think of myself as having a ticket in business on the LAX-LAS trip — even though the originally issued e-ticket showed "X" for that sector, a new display of that e-ticket info will show "I".
Again, the ticket hasn't changed. You are confusing a united.com eTicket receipt (which displays a mixture of PNR and ETKT data) with an actual ETKT.
Originally Posted by
mherdeg
So you're right to say that UA rarely "issues" a ticket in "R" since they don't start there. They normally first issue the ticket in a revenue booking class, then change the existing ticket. But they can "reissue" a ticket for other reasons that can cause the revalidated R to be visible to other carriers (as mentioned above).
And I certainly think it's fair to say that when upgraded, you are "ticketed in R" inasmuch as you are "ticketed on 3/17" after a date change from 3/15 to 3/17, or as much as you are "ticketed in Business" after changing one sector on an award ticket from coach to business.
The real test is: What would happen if you were traveling on a paper ticket? The answer is that your original paper ticket would stay the same from issuance to collection at the gate.
Originally Posted by
mherdeg
If you want to see something totally crazy re: e-tickets and upgrades, check out what SAS is doing with their partnership with optiontown.com,
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/sas-e...rades-sas.html. You pay this vendor a bidded price for an upgrade. These guys (who are set up as an online travel agency) exclusively handle already-issued SK tickets. They take control of your ticket and change the booking class to some kind of paid J bucket that accrues more miles and do an e-ticket exchange, all via some shady backdoor mechanism. If you need to make subsequent changes to the trip, you need to call this phony "OTA" and get them them to give control of the e-ticket back to a real agency or back to the airline. Crazy. Their solution to "upgrade" non-117 stock tickets is to add some free text to the reservation as supplemental information saying, basically, "this customer paid for an upgrade, please seat them in J" that is supposed to be respected at check-in time at the counter.
That is crazy.