Phantom Reservation
 

Four days ago I was doing some searches on UA.com to check if flights were available, times, etc. I ended up taking one of those dummy bookings all the way to the final payment screen.

Today, I logged in and see that the dummy booking is in my list of upcoming flights. Not only is there, but it is booked in full fare Y, has a PNR, seat assignments and the flights are supposedly ticketed and confirmed. The flights are both marketed and operated by MS but I can't pull up anything on their website with the UA PNR.

I cannot view the receipt or email it to myself. Both give me an error. I cannot find an eticket number.

None of my credit cards have been charged.

How should I proceed?

That's a new glitch. I suggest this is definitely a case to send to UAInsider. When is the "phantom flight"? I would suggest to mark your "PM urgent...phantom flight booked" to get their attention. Give them all the details, your MP #, date, flight #, etc. UAInsider will send it on to the IT people who will use this as a case study to help them fix computer glitches. We don't want people to find themselves in a fix where they end up getting their credit cards charged for flights for which they never authorized payment. :o

Will do. The phantom flight is in early June so it's not that urgent.

Had this happen to me as well but I just ignored it. I will double check my credit card to make sure I wasn't charged.

Thanks for the reminder.

I also got one probably due to a dummy reservation. It did not have any traveling date nor confirmation #/seat assignment. Considering the current UA issues, I just tuned it out.

This happened to me too, once on Friday 3/16 and on 3/17. The res showed up as not ticketed under "My Reservations" and i got a confirming email. So, I canceled them online, and they don't even show up in my canceled reservations (in contrast to one "real" reservation I canceled, which does show up there). I did get emails confirming the cancellations of these ghost reservations. There are no pending charges to my credit card, which I haven't saved in my UA account anyway.

I noticed that a chat window opened up when I hit the back button when I had gotten to the traveler info page, when pretending to make the reservation. I think that is what may have triggered it, but I'm not sure.

I'm not worried about it. Usually UA charges your credit card in a nanosecond, so if it hasn't shown up on your cc yet, you're probably in the clear. :D

I wanted to cancel it online but it won't allow me. If I try to make any changes or view the receipt, it just errors out.

just show up at the airport and see if you can board

what is the worst that can happen?

Seriously, though, these types of computer issues are not very reassuring.

Wow, that is definitely not the situation that I was in. This seems different. As I stated earlier, UA charges your cc lickety split for anything. If it hasn't been charged, you might not need to be too worried. If it were me, when there is time to wait on hold on speakerphone while you do something else, I would call Reservations, give them the record locator and tell them you'd like to cancel it. Just to close the loop.

And stop doing dummy bookings on ua.com for a while :) If you must, do it somewhere relatively safe like Priceline! I'm going to take my own advice. There are too many weird things happening with UA right now. ;)

You could get into a physical altercation with GA's. Joking, but... did you read the LAX-EWR meltdown thread? My next trip isn't until lucky April 13- I hope everything is close to normal by then.

Wish it was out of my home airport!

Will do that tonight. I was doing the dummy on UA because MS wouldn't take my new MP # on their website. I wanted to see if I could book it directly through UA since they're both *A. Yes, I could however we now run the risk of these phantom bookings.

Got the reservation canceled over the phone. The woman was really nice and even said "Thanks for flying with Continent....I mean United." as she was saying goodbye.

The reservation oddly enough does show up under the canceled reservations tab.