Originally Posted by
1Newflyer
You are probably right on all counts. How does the carrier know then to protect you on the next segment if pax misses the connection before it gets to that carrier? I understood that the carrier has a responsibility to backup the flight segment once pax is at the airport. If carriers don't talk to each other even in their own systems how does this mis-connect work. In other words, they don't know where the passenger is coming from or where pax is going after this particular segment.
In theory every copy of every PNR should have all flights of all airlines. Every airline's PNR is important however, because it's those individual PNRs that hold space for each respective airline. This is why when you book with UA for example, and you try to ckin on AC with the same PNR number, it doesn't work (or at least it didn't last time I checked). This is also why if you call AC with a UA PNR, your booking won't come up, unless you also have the equivalent AC PNR#.
The one thing however that all airlines can access is the ticket #. AC can pull up a 001 ticket, or 016 ticket, just like UA can pull up a 014 ticket. Therefore, the ticket is really the one indicator of the pax's final destination and itinerary if there's a flight missing on a PNR (but incomplete PNRs were a rather rare occurrence). The ticket also exists as a single, shared "entity", unlike the PNR which is duplicated across airlines.
So to answer your question, an absolute indicator of where a pax is going is the ticket. If you're halfway through your journey and you IROP, it's your ticket that dictates where the airline is responsible to re-protect you to.
This is also why if you buy a flight on AC to YYZ, an a separate ticket out of YYZ on UA (for example), and your AC flight IRROPs, then you won't be re-protected to your final destination, but to your ticketed final destination.
And that's, once more, the problem with the duality of tickets and PNRs, where one can have a ticket that says one thing, and a PNR that says something else.
Originally Posted by
SparseFlyer
It seems like we really under appreciate the complexities of airline systems. We book crazy RTW trips with multiple carriers and flights, make changes, go through IRROPS, and the whole thing still appears seemless with nary a hint of what is really going on.
Couldn't agree more, haha
