Originally Posted by
flyerCO
You're reading way too much into this.. They're not enforcing. Just if not canceled the system needs to be told to place as an "ecredit" vs it automatically happening.
I think it does still automatically happen for the majority of cases (ticket remains open, noval isn't applied). However because they were in a PNR with people who did travel, the system can't handle that situation automatically. Short answer is, if the gate agent had divided the non-traveller into their own PNR, the system would have automatically left the ticket open for future use.
Long answer: the reservation consists of the itinerary stored in the PNR and the ticket for a set of flights. Both of these need to match for the reservation to be valid and allow travel on that ticket/itinerary. You can only have one itinerary in a PNR, and it must be the same for every passenger and all the tickets in that PNR. At the time a flight is closed out, every one holding a confirmed seat needs a coupon accounting for that confirmed space. If you've boarded the flight, the close out turns the coupon for that portion of the ticket to "used". Historically (and technically, currently), if you didn't board the flight, the close out turns the coupon for that ticket to "no value" (because you held a confirmed seat with a matching coupon in your ticket and no-showed). This is 1) to enforce the historic rules regarding loss of value for no-showing, but 2) acts as a safeguard against a free flight incase the coupon didn't get lifted when the passenger boards (stops the ticket having value even if the passenger did fly but for whatever reason this didn't get recorded.)
The process of preserving ticket value involves deleting the scheduled itinerary from the PNR (i.e. what a reservation agent would do if you call to cancel in advance), that way during the close out process for the flight, it won't try to find a coupon to invalidate since there is no confirmed booking (aka you're not on that flight). To automatically do this, presumably at flight close out, the system checks for any confirmed bookings that don't have the coupon lifted yet, and clears those itineraries, prior to running the sweep to change coupon statuses. The problem here comes back to being in the same PNR as people who were travelling - the system can't delete the itinerary because of the people travelling as that would involve dropping their confirmed status. As before, the itinerary in the PNR has to be the same for everyone in it, so it can't drop the confirmed booking for the non-traveller either. So the non-traveller still has a confirmed booking when the system then runs the sweep to change the coupon status, and therefore applies the no-value against the coupon since it sees it as a no show.
The automated solution to this would be to automatically divide out the no-show into their own PNR and then cancel the itinerary in the new PNR, so the coupon doesn't get caught in the flight close out. However they probably thought this was a relatively niche case (in the grand scheme, how often is only a portion of the passengers in a reservation going to not travel), and there is an easy manual work around to quickly divide the PNR (and/or restore the ticket value when the OP's situation happened), that it wasn't worth the additional changes to automatically divide someone out when this situation presented itself.