Originally Posted by
ani90
OP did not make the duplicate reservation. United did. OP also did not leave a mess of the reservation. United did. United should be the one who should have cleaned up this reservation or not left a mess in first place. Or assuming OP had requested the change then AC should not have boarded him. As stated the interactions between airlines are complex but it can't be the passenger's responsibility to avoid or fix it. While the savvy FT flyer can do that, overwhelming majority of travelers don't know how to figure their reservation has been messed up, talk less know how to clean it. Airlines should do better and not leave customers' reservations in such state.
I wholeheartedly agree with this, and, assuming that we can take the OP's report at face value, then I reject the notion that the blame should be apportioned 50/50, as suggested above. Those arguing that everything happened as it should have, because, of course, failing to fly a held segment would result in the cancellation of the remainder of the itinerary, and that it was only by a stroke of luck (or misfortune) that the OP could only fly the original AC segments because of systems updating slowly, etc., etc., may explain how things unfolded the way they did, but the man on the Clapham omnibus cannot be expected, IMHO, to know all of this. Suppose he did get on the UA flight, then would the remainder of the itinerary still have been cancelled, because he did not fly the AC segment? Could he even have boarded the UA flight, given that it was unconfirmed? I suspect the answers are YES and NO respectively, given the discussion above, but I am by no means sure.
The OP said, "
Because I had checked in, UA said they could not confirm the UA SFO-YVR flight at all." Now, if this is what I'm told, then I would by no means assume that the new flight had been held for me, and I that I would need to cancel the hold. In fact, if I had a reservation for a flight that wasn't confirmed, then I would assume I couldn't fly. In the OP's case, I would have thought that I either needed to get AC to cancel the check-in and then ring UA to confirm the new flight, or simply to take the original flight, and the UA flight, being unconfirmed, would disappear without any repercussions. Clearly, I'm wrong, but the average flyer can't be expected to know the intricacies of the airlines' reservations systems. To be honest, I'm not sure what CONFIRMED means in the technical sense, but, regardless, it would not have occurred to me that that a segment that was HELD (and, by the OP's account, wasn't even aware that it had been held) but not CONFIRMED had to be flown or the remainder of the itinerary would be cancelled, since he did fly the original reservation. The mess was squarely caused by UA, as Ani90 suggested, and the onus was on them to fix it.
OP should have picked one flight and only called if they are definitely requesting a change ( as opposed to calling to explore the possibility).
Well, I think the OP did definitely pick the UA flight, but he was told it couldn't be confirmed because he had already checked in to the AC flight.