Originally Posted by
The Situation
From the days when AS and DL codeshared, I remember it is easy to give a ticket to another carrier, but impossible to take them away. I don't think OP understood the risks and I think the agent did the best they could, but things unfortunately did not work out. Communication is very important when dealing with multiple parties. When I used to have IRROPs on AS, I would make all the changes post security with the gate agents in control of the flights. My first step would be to talk to an agent from the airline that holds the ticket (DL in OP's case) and ask if they would be willing to sign the ticket over to another carrier. Then, I would go talk to the agent in control of the flight I wanted to be on (the UA flight in OP's case) and tell them what I was doing, and ask them if I could hold a seat. I would then go back to the agent for the airline holding the ticket (DL in OPs case) that I previously talked to and ask them very nicely to sign the ticket over. Most recently, I had a redcoat (supervisor) call to another airline to see if they had space available on an alternate flight during an oversold flight. Point is, you need to ensure that you have all your ducks in a row before you do something like this, because there are no takebacks.
Also, I doubt someone else jumping on the CVG itinerary would have mattered (DL would have oversold it if they had to) - it was more likely they could not get the ticket back from UA.
This is not accurate. Tickets and confirmed segments are two distinctly different components in an airline PNR. Let's say you have a reservation from JFK-LAX-JFK on DL. Your PNR would reflect two segments. If ticketed, there would be an accompanying ticket field with two flight coupons, one for each segment. Let's say the flight JFK to LAX is oversold and you volunteer to take an AA flight. The agent would sell in the AA segment and would leave the JFK-LAX segment on DL. Removing the segment from your reservation would drop the number of booked passengers decrease by one (no longer oversold). This is important only for inventory management and to justify VDB compensation for DL's bean counters. So, now you'd have three segments confirmed in the reservation:
1 DL JFK LAX
2 AA JFK LAX
3 DL LAX JFK
At this moment, AA will have a PNR in their system that reflects the booking of confirmed space on their JFK LAX flight. But there's no associated flight coupon for the AA flight. In the old days, you would simply print the coupon to paper, endorse it, and AA would collect the paper coupon for processing at the boarding gate. Now, the agent can go into the ticket and exchange the first coupon to generate a new ticket number based off of coupon 1 so that there is an electronic coupon that will populate in the AA reservation. It's still a DL ticket on 006 stock. DL can still further exchange that coupon, reverse the exchange by voiding the transaction, etc.
In the OP's situation, the DL agent clearly cancelled the CVG segments when they were cleaning up the reservation before ticket reissue. Once you release the inventory and save the PNR, that inventory goes back out in the world for other people to snag. What would have been a better play for the agent was to just sell the OAL segments, reorder the segments in the reservation and reissue the ticket.