First I’m having a real hard time understanding the OTA’s logic/reaction. I mean 99.9% of my travel is booked directly with UA but I have one charity client that insists on booking through their TA, and when I do something like apply an RPU/GPU that clears I get an few emails notifying me about a “schedule change” and asking me to confirm that the “new flights” (actually the same flight with a new booking class) are acceptable. Without fail, I tell them that it’s a cleared upgrade and certainly OK, they act confused about upgrades, and resync/revalidate the ticket and all is well with the world.

From my understanding of SHARES, pretty much any agent who knows what they’re doing -COULD- do this, but the chances of Internal Security and/or Revenue Management catching it and it ending with a termination are very high. At the dawn of the PSS integration post-merger when none of the pmUA agents really knew what they were doing in SHARES I said something about “what if you try...” and the agent said “Oh, you know SHARES? Do you want to just do it?” And spun the monitor and keyboard around to face me.

I declined because there was no way I saw that ending well (plus while I know some SHARES details there’s no way I’m fully competent) but I mentioned it to a friend who at the time worked for UA and came from CO and he asked why I didn’t use the opportunity to book myself a RTW ticket in J...

I also wonder how many fontline agents, even if they have the technical capability, would know how to do it. I still remember the last time I tried buying a ticket at a (hub) airport — it was going to be a fulll-fare walkup anyway, so the $25 or whatever was completely inconsequential — when the agent said “The ticket counter is not the place to buy a ticket, you need to either call or do it online”...