Originally Posted by
WineCountryUA
It is best / necessary to let the agent fix this issue and get a valid ticket condition. Once done if you want to do further changes yourself, that will likely be possible. But you need to let the agent "fix it"/ change it to a valid state first.
This is not a new problem, a search of this forum for "We are unable to process your request". yields 100+ posts going back years.
Exactly right. Once the ticket is in that state, there's nothing you can do online to make it fixable. The agent needs to rebook it for you.
And if I'm being fair to UA ... eTicketing is *incredibly* complex. The entire process is designed to emulate a paper process that dates back dozens of decades, using technology that's not terribly newer than the paper process... and within that emulation, there are many ways things can be out of sync or end up in a state that requires manual intervention.
Applying 2022-era thinking (I can change anything I want, anytime I want, anywhere I want, on any device I want) to 1970s era technology that emulates 1940s era paper processes sometimes leads to disappointment. This is one of those times.
Honestly, there's a small piece of me that wonders if the industry missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent some of this stuff during the Covid crisis, while traffic was at historic lows. Same with ATC - wish they could've found a way to accelerate NextGen.