A small problem seems to have occurred with my RTW booking, and I was hoping you guys could advise me on the best course of action. A few months ago I booked the following CRWSTAR1 through a travel agent in Bangkok:

TG 991 BKK-SYD
SQ 232 SYD-SIN
SQ 318 SIN-LHR
UA 905 LHR-JFK
NH 009 JFK-NRT
NH 909 NRT-HKG
TG 603 HKG-BKK

I completed the first two of these segments in December, all the rest are coming up in May.

The big mistake I made (apparently) was when I called up United Reservations in Singapore a few days ago and asked them to move the LHR-JFK segment a couple of days forward. They duly complied and confirmed I was booked on the flight I requested, but imagine my surprise when later that day I looked up my booking on checkmytrip.com and found that the segment in question had in fact disappeared. I called up United again and informed them of the problem, but they told me there was nothing they could do and that this would pose no problem to the rest of my itinerary.

My question to you is: Is this something I should be concerned about, if so who should I contact to have it fixed? Could NH cancel my reservation with them because of this missing segment? (I assume this could invalidate the requirements of the RTW ticket.)

Hmm. Did UA claim they also could not see the LHR-JFK sector? How did they expect you to get from LHR-JFK? Surely in the PNR, it will show up as a missing segment in the PNR with no "ARNK" sector for own arrangements, so that should tip them off. I suspect something's jiggered with the PNR. If UA say they can see your flight in the PNR then don't worry it's just some kind of bug between them and checkmytrip reading it. If you're a UA MP member, have you checked "My Itinearies" on united.com to see if it is listed? I would not take some res agent's assurance that "it will be OK" If you're all all concerned. If the sector weas there and it's gone, it would seem clear to me that UA has to fix it - and moreso it should be obvious from looking at the PNR that the sector was there (eg: skipping from say sector 4 to sector 6). Call them back and ask for a sup if they're not helping.

good luck.

Thanks for your answer Richard.

When I called UA back to complain about the missing segment I tried giving them the Amadeus reservation code so they could see the problem for themselves, but the agent said she could not locate any reservation under that number. I assumed this had something to do with UA maybe not having access to Amadeus as my initial rebooking had been made solely on the basis on my name and flight number.

I this is indeed the case and UA can only see my UA flights I seem to cought in somewhat of a tangle here as I guess no travel agent would be able to locate the missing segment either. Any ideas on who to call? If UA's US offices are more experienced with RTWs than Singapore I'm thinking they may be the best to call.

UA does not use Amadeus. So if you call them, your Amadeus PNR will not be automatically be updated with the new flight information.

As long as UA has your reservation and you have a ticket that matches, you're good to go.

You can have multiple reservations for one ticket or also multiple tickets for one reservation.

Looks like UA started a new reservation number for the missing segment. You should be able to ask united for the reservation number and check this reservation.

Also the follow on reservation should not cause any problems, since you are going to fly all segments in this reservations.

Usually you end up having problems when there are segments in one reservations which you dont fly, since this triggers often the cancellation of the follow on segments.

The problem here is that Star Alliance airlines do not use the same reservation systems.

Usually, when a PNR is set up at one specific system, in this case Amadeus, the one your TA uses, certain parts of this PNR will be copied to the CRS the individual airline uses.

However, if some parts of the PNR are changed in on of the airline's systems, they do most of the time, but not necesseraly at all times, update each other.

So in my opinion, UA either started a new PNR with the single flight, or they added the flight in the booking, and for whatever reason the GDSs did not communicate properly and the flight did not make it back into Amadeus.

I do not think the ongoing flights will be cancelled. However, for future use, most of the time the easiest way to do this is through whoever you booked the ticket with.

Thanks for all your comforting answers. The reason I went directly to UA in this case was from good experience in dealing directly with TG on a similar question. In that case I called up TG reservations and asked them to book me on a later flight (no change in routing or dates) and they handled this very smoothly with my original booking updated as per checkmytrip.com.

Compared to the somewhat less responsive nature of my Bangkok travel agent (I've been using Traveller 2000 and it takes days to get an answer by email) working directly with the airlines just seems much faster. It also seems - though this is merely speculation - that availability is better when going through the airlines, ie. a CRWSTAR for instance is treated more like a normal D class ticket and is not subject to the same space regulations I have experienced with my travel agent. Is this something others have experienced as well or just a coincidence?

BTW, who issued the ticket ? i.e. whose document it is on ?

In my last RTW, UA Reservations refused to make any changes, and I had to call Austrian which had issued the ticket. Austrian was happy to make the changes and it showed up on checkmytrip.com.

But, later on the same journey, SAS was happy to make changes to the SAS segments. Even re-routing..

so, i guess the problem is entirely with the different Reservation ssystems used. I would get hold of the new booking reference from UA.

If you are using a BKK travel agent, then I suspect it's a Thai ticket, in which case you'll always get good response from Thai.

thanks

It's on TG yes so I guess that could have something to do with it.

Sounds to me like you're in a bit a bind. Even if the ticket is on TG ticket stock (issued ex-BKK) that's kind of not too relevant to the current situation (well I believe anyway - I could always be wrong!). As others have said, UA cannot see your amadeus reservation, so giving them that PNR is useless (and it gets confusing since they're all 6 character strings). My experience is that the issuing agent (in this case, your T/A in BKK) setup the "master" PNR in Amadeus, and when that is set up, SSR's are sent to the other airlines in the itin to setup records in their own system (if they don't use amadeus), as such each airline involved will have a different PNR identifier for the same trip - usually I ask the agent I am working with to give me those PNR's when they give the main one, or I grab it from another source (such as viewing "My Itinearies" on united.com). This is not crucial, since you can just give a flight number/date and they can locate your record that way.

So, if the T/A made a change to your flights, it's their responsibility to see that the other carriers get the info updated. However, if you change via one of the airlines one of their flights (eg: UA) who will them modify their "mini PNR", that will not be reflected back in the "master" PNR (for some reason the updates don't always get transmitted back, or they might send an OSI (note) to the T/A to let them know, as they would with a time change or other event like that - then again it is up to the T/A to notice it and do something (or nothing) about it).

The usual situation that this becomes important in my experience is when you do things like apply upgrades, since (at least with UA) they like to "take control" of the reservation to apply the upgrades, and then it's out of the hands of the T/A totally - so I usually warn the agent that this will happen - this is after ticketing, so the agents are usually happy to be rid of it. LOL. That's when I do all changes via united.

In your situation though, it seems like someone at UA SIN stuffed up somehow, and it needs to be fixed. Good luck!

Just a quick update on this one. Contacted my BKK travel agent and explained the situation to her. She confirmed what many of you said - that UA had indeed taken over the booking and this was the reason it had disappeared from the master booking. She could still however see the updated UA flight in her systems where it was listed as confirmed. So it seems there is a limit to how much information checkmytrip can extract from your bookings, for some things you still need a proper TA!