Originally Posted by jsloan

When making a multi-carrier award, you want to make sure that each carrier involved sees confirmed seats and the same e-ticket number. When you changed the ticket, it's likely that UA reissued it, generating a new e-ticket number. It's likely that the new e-ticket was never transmitted to OZ, so in their system you had a reservation that was linked to an invalid ticket (the old e-ticket was marked as exchanged/reissued -- essentially, voided -- when you made the change). Additionally, to make sure you're looking at the right document, you can enter your UA e-ticket number (starting with 016) in the Manage Bookings tab at http://www.saudia.com . Saudia provides the ability to look up the status of anybody's ticket in their Global Distribution System (GDS), which seems to be the same one that UA uses. If your flight coupons show a status of "OK" or "Airport Control," the ticket is valid; if they show "Exch./Reissued" or something else, the ticket is not valid and you need to get a new receipt from UA.

Anyway, I'm sorry to hear about the hassle, but I hope this information will help prevent a recurrence in the future.