bricksoft

I'm not sure how familiar you are with some of the terminology used. You seem to confuse bookings with tickets and tickets wit boarding passes. This makes it more difficult to understand what has happened.

Did any of your e-mail confirmations have a ticket or more than one ticket number.
ticket numbers are 10 digits long. The first three digits denote who issued the ticket

014 AC
016 UA
999 CA

A single itinerary could have multiple tickets.

when UA or AC check your booking on the phone they could see a confirmed booking with seat assignments but if it has not been ticketed then you will not be able to check-in. A booking reference is usually 6 digits a mix on numbers and letters.

My initial thoughts about your situation is that tickets had not been issued for all the segments. i could be wrong.
We need to know how many booking references and how many ticket numbers you had.

Stranger

If the ticket was issued by United, then even if the problem occurred with the AC leg then she should deal with United about the issue.

Also, one needs to be careful about reservation vs. Ticket. Checking with airlines using the booking reference will yield information about reservations, set assignment etc. But not necessarily abpout ticketing issues. Which these previous phone calls might not have identified.

Adam Smith

OP, this is an odd situation. If an AC agent at a check-in counter knows a passenger's name and flight, it shouldn't be hard to find them. It's hard to say whether UA messed something up or the AC agent at PEK did, but it seems more likely that there was a screw-up on the UA end than the AC end. I'd probably be pushing them on this issue.

Do you happen to have the ticket number(s)? I wonder whether you could glean any information from looking it (or them) up on the Saudia website.

You say that, and yet I just searched the decisions on the CTA website for "denied boarding" and not once did the validity of the ticket come up in the context of Canadian regulations. It came up once in the context of someone asking the CTA to enforce EU261 compensation after DL failed to allow a passenger to check in for a YUL-JFK-CDG itinerary due to not presenting her credit card, when CTA pointed out that DL's actions did not constitute denied boarding since there was a question as to whether or not there was a valid ticket. And that determination was that this was a case of refusal to transport, not denied boarding.

Which is contrary to what you've said.

If you have some evidence to support what you've said, please provide it.

By the way, most denied boarding cases that CTA has decided revolve around whether valid documents were presented (usually relating to visa requirements) or failure to show up at the gate on time.

canadiancow

I once had a UA issued ticket with a codeshare operated by AC. There was no reservation for that flight, even though there was a ticket.

I've definitely had cases with Aeroplan tickets where an unticketed change (i.e. there's a reservation but no ticket) causes other issues.

So it's not clear who's at fault here.

It is clear that AC is going to be best able to shed some light on what happened, and it seems like they certainly could have been more helpful.

YEG USER

Probably a dumb question as I’ve never flown AC out of China. If the passenger could bring up the reservation in the app, could they not OLCI for the AC flight?

Also, this flight happened 2 months ago, and seats were reserved/confirmed a month prior. It sounds like this could be an Amadeus conversion issue as the timeframe could mean the reservation was made pre-conversion.

canadiancow

Having a boarding pass does not mean you have a valid ticket, so whether you can OLCI isn't relevant.

YEG USER

True, but I was thinking more along the lines of the agent being able to find information on the booking. If the pax had been able to OLCI then the pax’s name would show up on the list of passengers checked in and then that could help the agent find other potentially useful information about the booking.

canadiancow

The issue was that "they could not find the ticket in their system".

Assuming the passenger recalls the right word, and the agent was using the correct word, then it sounds like typical ticketing issue.