Originally Posted by
Kacee
It was originally an IT limitation.
This is what I meant when I said it was a relic of unix!
Originally Posted by
Lux Flyer
Because you're working off services, standards and common interfaces which were developed 50+ years ago and are still limited by those initial decisions due to the need to communicate with other airlines reservations systems. The change you're asking for would require every one you interline with and they interline with to all reprogram their reservations systems to handle this change. And airlines have a hard enough time to get reservations to update properly & stay in sync when one partner makes a change, that there is bigger fish to fry then going after supporting multiple booking codes in a same reservation.
As an example, lets say SHARES suddenly has the ability to support multiple bookings codes in a single reservation, but there is a LH flight the passenger is connecting to - how do I transmit that to LH if Amadeus doesn't also support that capability? Am I making two separate reservations on LH's end to account for each booking code? Which passenger gets which? What if I want to make a change for only one of the passengers? WHat if LH has a schedule change, how do they send that message from 2 PNRs back to a single PNR in UA's system? ETc.
The more straight-forward solution is to keep your existing PNR structure for commonality with your interline partners and find some other way to provide a proper link of the PNR so for all intents they're treated as if they're travelling together in your own system, as that doesn't require a huge buy-in/investment for all airlines.
OK, I finally understood. It is path-dependent. Initially, an IT limitation, no one has any incentive to change now because the costs would be prohibitive.
Traveling on separate records is annoying in case of changes or cancellations. It happened to me once when a flight was canceled, and different passengers were rebooked on different flights. It took hours on the phone to sort this out. Since that time, I usually pay the premium and book everyone at the higher bucket. But I wished someone corrected this 1970s relic. Seriously.