I had an interesting situation happen yesterday, one that grew more and more worrisome the more I thought about it, as it seemed to be indicative of multiple process failures. I was boarding a United flight from ORD to DEN and while I waited, it was apparent that at least one flight that morning had been cancelled, as there were 40+ people on the stand-by list. I boarded the flight in Group 1 and went to my assigned seat (11F). About 10 minutes later, it appeared that there was some musical chairs going on in the rows behind me. All of the sudden, the passenger behind me politely poked me on the shoulder and said that it appeared that I was in his seat. He held up a boarding pass that showed he had been assigned 11F. At the same time, I held up my own boarding pass that showed my assigned seat of ... 11F. A few moments later, one of the flight attendents walked over, compared the boarding passes, and said, "Ok, which one of you is FIRST NAME, MIDDLE NAME, LAST NAME?" I raised my hand and to my surprise, the other passenger behind me
also raised his hand.
At this moment, the flight attendant asked for our IDs and sure enough, we had identical names (Identical in spelling as well). At this point, the flight attendent looked quite confused. I told him my MileagePlus number, which corresponded with the boarding pass. I started talking to my name doppleganger and he said that he had been on an earlier cancelled flight and he had been rebooked on a flight later that afternoon. He had gone to United Customer Service to see if he could jump on this flight and was given that boarding pass. Eventually, the gate crew looked at my ID and looked at his ID and figured out that my birthdate corresponded to the passenger record that was supposed to be on the flight, but there was a very weird 15 minutes there.
What I'm guessing happened (I don't know for sure) is that the doppleganger had gone to customer service trying to get on the earlier flight, the attendant working looked at the passenger manifest and said, "Oh, he must have automatically been rebooked on this flight" and printed out a duplicate of my boarding pass.
At this point, I have two questions (if my scenario above is true):
- Did the customer service agent just not perform any additional checks like verifying the PNR/Confirmation Numbers/Birthdays and issue the duplicate boarding pass? I get that mistakes happen, we're human, but that's a bit concerning.
- If I got on the aircraft first, why did United's system allow the doppleganger sitting in the exact same seat to scan the boarding pass and get on the aircraft? Wouldn't that have kicked off some sort of error message? "I only have one Korben Dallas on this flight and he's already checked in."
Anyway, weird circumstance and it ended up getting sorted out, but I'm just curious if this or something similar has happened to anyone else, as the flight crew and gate crew had never heard of something like that happening before.