HELP! I recently flew to Germany from the USA with my family. I booked the travel with Continental, but we missed our return flight out of Frankfurt (we were late to the airport). There were no more Continental flights (only one per day) and since we had our 9 month old son with us, the ticket agent had pity on us and printed our e-tickets to paper and sent us over to Lufthansa who flew us home. We only ended up receiving Continental miles for the trip from the USA to Germany. Here's my question: Can I get Continental miles for my return trip even if they signed the ticket over to another carrier? Do I get miles on the other carrier instead? I don't have a Lufthansa frequent flyer membership, but I do have US Airways who is a Star Alliance partner with them... Any suggestions?

No you cannot as you were vouluntairly re-accommodated to Lufthansa. Here is where you can find more details under the section "Mileage Credit for Cancelled Flights."

Wow....quite a few CO no-no's on this one.

1. CO doesn't like to print paper tickets. They would much rather you wait around for 30 minutes while the agent calls the helpdesk trying to figure out how to reissue it electronically. 30 minutes is nothing, as etickets "save money."

2. CO doesn't like other airline reroutes, especially in situations where it wasn't CO's fault. Unless your ticket was refundable, I doubt the agent should have done this.

Was there something else to the story? Perhaps you made it technically on time, CO was overbooked, and they just took care of you without any denied boarding compensation?

I don't know, but this story just sounds out of line with what CO would normally have done: "Sorry, you missed your flight, the next one with space is 3 days from now. How about going home on Friday?"

The reason is, if you can figure out what that something else is (if there is something), then you can use that as grounds for original routing credit.

you probably cant get miles on CO, but should be able to get miles for that return trip on USAIR as long as your kept your BP's and everything.
http://www.usairways.com/awa/content...e/default.aspx

p.s. from experience, sometimes they will take baggage tags as additional proof if you are missing certain documents.

To credit missing flight activity for any travel on a partner airline, write the Dividend Miles Service Center at the address below and include your name, address, account number and a copy of the ticket receipt(s) and the original boarding pass(es), indicating seat assignments. These documents must be submitted via mail.

US Airways
Dividend Miles Service Center
PO Box 025458
Miami, FL 33102
USA

There definitely wasn't anything else to the story. I'm an airline employee myself and I knew she wasn't supposed to do it.. She purely seemed to simply be willing to "break the rules" because we were in such a tight spot and had an infant with us. I thanked her profusely. If I had any money, I would have given her a big tip. As for the USAirways miles, I'm pretty sure that's the route I'm going to go. I do have the boarding passes, I was just worried that because I don't have the ticket number (it was on the paper tickets) that they will give me a problem.

Forgive my ignorance but I never understood: why are paper tickets "bad"?

idnlgeah, I wish I have had your luck when I arrived late for a flight...

luck and a Cute Baby always helps

but I am glad CO helped you out, glad to know that airlines can still come through even when they dont have too

The accounting for the paper tickets has to happen manually on the back end. I believe there are a lot of issues related to the accounting of tickets (i.e., while they collect cash up front for a ticket, a ticket cannot be booked as revenue until it is used or voided), so being able to do this electronically is a lot cheaper for the company.

With that said, CO goes through great lenghts to keep everyone on accurate e-tickets. CO tends to do so, even if it means waiting around at the gate, using the GA's time, the Helpdesk's time, all while the customer is waiting. The irony is that it probably costs them more money this way during irregular ops (and it adds to customer frustration since the rebooking queues take longer).

Other carriers can simply associate flight coupons to new flights, even if they don't match. This gets the customer going right away, they still maintain electronic accounting (though it's not as precise).

The point is that etickets don't have to be so painful. CO just makes them a good bit worse then they have to be.

Last summer, I had booked LAX-EWR-OSL, on my way home from a vacation in the US.. Due to weather at EWR, we missed the flight to OSL.. CO rerouted us to LIS on CO, and LIS-OSL on SAS..