I often find that I cannot add my BP to my Apple Wallet. I've never figured out why. It's just that sometimes that option does not appear within the app.

Like many of us, I rely (too much so, apparently) on a digital BP. This thread has cautioned me to start printing BPs while on international itineraries. There are more than enough remedies while traveling domestically. For example, last week the TSA reader at BUR could not, for reasons that I don't get, scan my digital BP (subsequent scans of the same BP during boarding and at the lounge at SFO were fine), but it was a matter of minutes to run back to the kiosk, print the paper BP and get through security. But I can see many more ways that things could go wrong while outside of the US.

As far as calling United, jsloan, I think that that would have been the best way to go. But I can also see how that might not have occurred to someone during an adrenaline-infused haze on the battlefield.