Originally Posted by
Random_Flyer
While it is certainly unfortunate that your friend lost his ticket, it is completely wrong to say that he was treated "unfairly," "poorly" and "rudely" siimply because UA required him to purchase a ticket to travel on the next flight out.
Well, I wasn't there, so I don't know exactly how the CS staff behaved. That said, if I was travelling in China and something like this happened to me (remembering, of course, that most of the documents would then be in Chinese and the procedures would be unfamiliar to me), I'd be pretty P.O'd.
It's a classic "gotcha" problem.