I'm in the Maldives right now on my honeymoon. It's amazingly beautiful here, but I'm spending some of my vacation time on the phone with my friends at United. And, it isn't going well.

We redeemed a round-the-world in business class back last year on the old United reservations system. One of the legs we booked went Singapore-Sydney-Auckland. Last week, we saw the non-stop Singapore-Auckland opened up, and so I called in and requested we do an exchange to it. We've done lots of exchanges before -- it was easy on the old system... call, maybe sit on hold while taxes were calculated... pay the tax difference (if any) and get on with your life.

It's hell now. You call into the Partner/Round the World desk. There's no 1K line for that, so you can wait an hour or more to get an agent. You request what you want - they're very nice about it, of course - but they they send it off to a back hole called pricing and tell you to call back in 24 hours. When you do, you pay tax differences and the reissue goes through. Trivial, no. But it works okay I suppose.

Until this exchange. I called back 24 hours later and got the reissue. Taxes were coming back, since I dropped an airport/country. But when I called Singapore to get seats on the new flight, they showed me on the old one. I got the new ticket number, and everything: still on the old flights.

So, I called United and they got involved. The Singapore flight is still available--but after 3 calls to Singapore, 4+ hours of my time on the phone with United, and lots of back and forth they just can't figure out how to get the exchange to show up on the Singapore side. Sadly, they gave up my seat on the original routing so I can get to Sydney (in the original seat), but we can't get to Auckland since the NZ flight isn't available anymore.

Basically, they broke the trip and aren't especially helpful about getting it fixed. The best proposal was to put me on TG (Thai) and send me via Bangkok, but that will cost me a whole day of my trip and add some costs. So, regretfully, I'm now having them just get me back home. I'm frustrated as can be with United, their systems, and their very willing but now hamstrung agents.

I've got the rest of my 24 hours to figure out ... to do with this. Any ideas? That AA match to EXP is sounding better and better...

A friend was traveling on a CO-issued award ticket about 4 months ago that involved flying SYD-SIN on SQ. Prior to his departure, he had made some date changes.

The SQ customer service line didn't see the change and told him CO had to reissue the ticket. CO said they didn't need to do anything. Quite oddly, it was possible for him to check-in online to the correct flights.

I'm not sure how to convince COdbaUA to force through a reissue that they don't think they need to do. That said, killing off your stop in New Zealand simply because you do not want to connect in Bangkok seems a bit extreme.

I'm killing the stop because my 5 day stopover became a 3-day stopover due to the change, making the activities I'd planned in NZ difficult to impossible.

United proposed I book a new 1-way award SIN-AKL at 60k per person to fix the problem. I politely said I didn't see how this was a solution to my problem.

This should be a cautionary tale to others that, during these times of post-merger woes, it's better to leave well enough alone. At least until this airlines's mountain of policy, operational, and IT issues reduce down to a molehill. I'm quickly calculating all the time this poster has spent on the phone dealing with this (rather than concentrating on honeymoon enjoyment) and still not getting an optimum result.

I think the moral of this story is: UA ticketing is totally FUBAR. Stay the ---- away if it's important to get where you're going.

Incidentally, I ultimately made it back home.

Glad to hear you made it, but really sorry about the horrible experience along the way. By the way, what happened in the end? Did you simply rebook via BKK and skip New Zealand?

I'm not sure how much of this is merger related. I had plenty of premerger problems with making changes as well. Similar problems with flights not synching in SQ's system.

You should do it anyway. ~8 months of top tier elite status on another airline for free? It's a no brainer...

Sorry if this is off topic but I have a question for you (First off Congrats on your Honeymoon). I spent mine in the Maldives as well and you could not find a nicer spot)
On to my question. We travel every year to the Maldives but on EK via DXB. I know SQ flys to/from Singapore but who did you fly INTO the Maldives on *A. I assume on a RTW tkt you came from Europe/Africa/Middle East

Thanks

Sorry they messed up your trip.

CO has historically had interconnection issues with its partners. Messed up and dropped segments is not uncommon.

Now that UA is using CO's systems, this sort of stuff is not surprising. Especially since CO's systems can't ticket instantly, many partners will drop space if there's no ticket issued quickly.

Hopefully now with more members and more visibility, they'll be able to start fixing some of these issues that have been plaguing CO's systems for years.