This is a year-old story, finally resolved - but now I know about the expertise here on this site, I was interested to hear comments and thoughts on how I could have dealt with it better. If I'm in the wrong forum - apologies, someone please move it:-)

I was flying C-class UA/BA (paper tickets) from PDX - YVR - LHR on a day when BA had to cancel loads of flights out of LHR and I found out about 8 hours before my flight that my YVR-LHR plane was not flying. I was due in meetings and so had to make quick decisions about getting on a flight.

I called BA and they said that since my ticket was on UA stock they could do nothing about it (is this really true?) and that I would have to call UA. I called UA and they said that it wasn't their responsibility.

By this time it was feasible to call my travel agent direct and she said that UA should help me, but that she would book me on the AC flight since there was only one C-class seat left - but this would be a $3000 eticket.

En toure to my meetings I tried UA again and this time they said that they could, of course, change it and that they could see my new eticket - but that I didn't need that - they would transfer my paper ticket and i should go to the UA ticket desk before checking with AC.

So I called my travel agent and said i didn't think I needed the eticket any more.

So, to cut a long story short - finally I get the $3000 charge to my Amex card and when i dispute it i discover that AC say i flew on the eticket and UA says I flew (on the same flight) on the paper ticket and so neither is willing to credit me the fare.

About 12 months of investigation by Amex travel - fortunately all the tickets were on the same Amex card - led to the acceptance that i could only have used one ticket and so my cc was credited with the extra fare.

To this day I do not really know what happened or which ticket was credited back.

So, I'd really love to hear from those of you here who are in the industry (or in the know) about how I might have handled this differently.

Thanks

David
PS. My travel was agent was either unable or unwilling to assist in all this and I'm not sure why that was, since they are great agents that I would normally recommend most highy.

Hi SeattleDavid and welcome to Flyertalk.

Milesbuzz is for posting miles and points info, so I'm going to move this to the travel buzz forum. You can follow the discussion over there.

Flip

CONFERENCE CALL!!! Or go to the airport and DEMAND a supervisor from UA and BA have a little talk.

Welcome to Flyertalk, David.

I don't really think there is anything YOU could have done differently - as a passenger you are very much at the mercy of airline and travel agent staff, and in an ideal world one would expect to be able to trust these travel professionals to know how to do their job properly. However, we don't live in an ideal world, and it seems that on this particular occasion you encountered a number of people who didn't know their jobs as well as they should have done, or who had made a decision not to help you when they could have done.

BA claimed that there was nothing they could do. They could have done something, they could have made a reservation for you on another flight. Making a reservation and issuing/changing a ticket are two separate operations which are not necessarily linked, and BA could have made a reservation for you and instructed you to sort out the ticketing with UA/AC. However, I suspect that with having several plane loads of stranded passengers to sort out they had probably made a decision only to help their own customers (i.e., those booked through their system and ticketed on their stock) and to leave the others to fend for themselves. A decision I can sympathise with to some degree as they were probably rushed off their feet and they weren't going to get any revenue out of making that reservation for you.

I don't know why UA initially refused to help you - though this could simply be a matter of policy (i.e., they may have a company policy not to "get involved" if a booking has been made by someone else).

I'm sorry to say that in my opionion the blame probably lies with your travel agent. As you already had a ticket from YVR to LHR they should NEVER have booked you an e-ticket. As I said before, ticketing and reservations are separate operations, and they should simply have made a reservation for you, informed AC that you already hold a ticket (by phone, or by way of an entry in your reservation) and instructed you to get your existing ticket endorsed at the UA ticket desk prior to checking in.

As a matter of interest - when you checked in for the AC flight, did they take your ticket coupon? If they didn't then that would explain why they thought you were travelling on the e-ticket. (If they did they probably lost it!)

Thanks Aviatrix - I wonder how many travellers are aware of how separate ticketing andreservations are. I certainly wasn't - though, of course, my travel agent's behavior encouraged me in the belief that they are intimately tied together.

Seeing the separation helps me see why BA would have been too busy to help - though as I was travelling on a $7000 ticket, I still find the lack of customer service from everyone involved disturbing.

In regards to your last question, when i checked in at PDX it was with UA and they took my paper coupons for both my PDX-YVR leg and the AC YVR-LHR leg - so I never actually checked in with Air Canada.

David