Minor Separated - Help Please
 

Can anyone advise how to handle this? I booked a reward flight in December of last year for December of this year. One way from Canada to Oregon (so it’s international). I then booked a full priced flight for my daughter (14) to accompany me and our itineraries were linked. Our original flight was cancelled and we were rebooked. They separated us and now have her on a flight that won’t work for us! My flight is completely full (it’s the same weekend Taylor Swift is performing so flights are crammed.) and customer service told me that she’s old enough to stay in another country and fly out herself (at 14). They absolutely won’t move her to my flights and any other available flight doesn’t work for us (either far too really or far too late). This seems crazy to me?! At very least, it’s heartless. Does anyone know a better way to escalate this? Thanks for any tips!

There is no such thing as linked itineraries. If you need to travel together you need to book this on the ‘same’ reservation. There is nothing you can do if a flight is sold out. The best option is likely to get a full refund - a cancelled flight allows that! Then you rebook on another airline together.

Thanks for the reply! But I think in this case, they were actually linked. In order to purchase her a ticket (as a minor) I had to link her to an adult reservation. It was a pop window I had to fill out and was confirmed by a customer service agent later. Thats why it’s odd to me. They wouldn’t let me book her alone, but they separated her from me in another country?

If this was booked on the same PNR I don't see how this could possibly get separated This was booked at the same time??? If these are separate reservations the system will treat them as such.
You write the flight is sold out - there isn't anything that can be done about that. I'd look for flights that have available confirmable space. With a cancellation you can get a free re-booking - for each of the 2 passengers. I don't see how that would be a problem at all.

The "link" is a cross reference in each PNR to look at the other one. But 2 PNRs cannot be combined. They can be split, but not combined. I can certainly see permitting the "link" to permit what would otherwise be a UM to not be a UM, but find it odd that an airline would turn a non-UM into a UM. Sounds like someone didn't notice the "link" cross reference when creating this cluster. I'd escalate.

Airline systems in general cannot really link reservations. Any such “link” created by an agent or by the system (as seems to be in your case) is nothing more than a comment in one reservation mentioning the other, so agents (humans) can see the connection between the passengers. But automated processes like upgrades or rebooking (in your case) don’t understand those “comment” links.

AS is unlikely going to put one of you on the other person’s flight when it is no longer open for sale. And they aren’t going to cancel some other passenger’s reservation to make room. You could keep your current reservations and see if space opens up as other passengers maybe cancel. I think a tool like ExpertFlyer might be able to let you create alerts. And maybe in parallel create a reservation on another airline if you have miles for both of you or are willing to buy a revenue ticket that can be canceled for travel credit if your AS reservations get fixed.

AS (apparently) dropped the ball by permitting the OP to purchase the minor's ticket by inputting this "linkage" information, later confirmed by a human. The remedy is for AS to force another seat into inventory, creating a potential (but not necessarily) an oversell situation.

thanks for the suggestions - we will likely to have to find another airline as you suggested. I understand what you are saying about the “linked” being a comment computers don’t understand. But as a previous person said, the system would have had to change her from an accompanied minor to an unaccompanied minor to do this which I imagine would require some sort of notification or paperwork? That’s the part I don’t get and I can’t find any policy that states this is a possibility. If there is one, I’d love to read it and understand better for the future.

Thank you for everyone’s help! It seems like it was a computer error that her age wasn’t flagged and she shouldn’t have been moved. They were able to kindly fix it so all is good. Sometimes things just happen….

How exactly did they "fix" it? What did they do? Put you both on the same plane? Put you on another airline? Give you your money back so you could rebook?

When booking an adult and a minor, it is best to book the minor on the miles, and the adult as a paying customer….and as you discovered, age does matter in terms of how someone can be rebooked.

Options, as far as I can tell:
1. choose a different origination or destination airport. Not sure what your itinerary is, so I can’t recommend any.
2. Fly a different day
3. Charter a flight

Probably forced the seat as available. But we'll wait and see what the OP says.
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Or, better yet, it's best to book both in a single transaction on a single ticket, and leave these fiddles using different tickets and different payment methods for passenger groups where it doesn't actually matter that you're not travelling together

The original flight was reinstated. It was a glitch where the computer or agent didn’t see her age so she was pushed from accompanied to unaccompanied without notification. She had even been rebooked on a very late flight that she wouldn’t have been allowed to board as an unaccompanied minor per their own policy. Ultimately, her rebooking wouldn't have been feasible regardless and it would have been uncovered as an issue at some point. It was better discovered now than closer to the flight dates! There wasn’t anything nefarious that happened, it was just a weird one-off mistake that took some digging to understand and correct.