2014 UA Issued Awards on Air China (CA) Are Mysteriously Being Canceled (Hacked?)
 

We had an award trip to Australia booked for the 2nd half of May, outbound in coach on UA, return in business class on China Air.

Received an email today from United -- in Chinese. I don't read Chinese.

Logged into our accounts and found that the itinerary had been canceled, leaving us holding the bag on $1K in nonrefundable domestic Australian flights on Qantas & JetStar, plus some hotel reservations.

This has to be the absolute worst customer service example I've ever experienced in the reservations department.

Well, I guess the upside is you actually got an email despite it being in a foreign language, which is more than most people seem to receive.

how do you know it was canceled by UA and not china air?

Who cares?

I suppose there's a rosy side to everything! :)

I was thinking .bomb had done splendidly well in rebooking this until I got to the end:

OK, so schedules change and flights are canceled which kill the itin. Did you call UA and did they accommodate you on another flight to arrive similar times? Or any options?

Onward tickets on separate PNR's, separate airlines are not their fault.

We have plenty to blame UA for doing and alienating us FF already which are planned. No reason to hit them at the moment on yours.

Never heard of that airline!

Proper notification and rebooking remain United's responsibility. This is a major fail.

And yes, I will hit them with my problems at this point. If they can't keep reservations validly booked -- there were plenty of options available -- then they've earned whatever bad publicity they get.

And if I choose the cancel/redeposit "option", they want to charge me $400 for canceling an itin that they've already canceled!!!!

I strangely got flight cancelation notice from United last month in Spanish. (Which, thank god, I read)

You must be booked for the return on Air China (IATA: CA), not China Airlines (IATA: CI) as they are not part of Star Alliance. Likely, what happened was that Air China decided to cut a route from Australia to China (by any chance, Sydney-Beijing?, that flight changes to a 1-stop via Shanghai during Australian winter but operates on a different flight number so you will need to check for availability to make the change). Call UA Reservations ASAP and ask if you can be booked on other carriers with open availability or if UA can open availability for you.

+1. I had a flight cancellation on China Eastern in paid first <3 weeks before departure (link). Hopefully UA will do better than my OTA (Exp) did. Let us know how it goes.

So what happened when you called?

Currently on hold but appears to be going ok. After a brief session of voice-recognition hell, the wait for a live person was < 1 minute. The rep needs to get another dept. to change it to get the layover in Beijing out of the reservation.

Rep gets an "A" so far.

Done, better schedule, disappointed to lose stop in Beijing but that was secondary.

UA really needs to improve its notifications!!!!

Yes, was SYD-PEK-LAX on May 29-30.

Agreed, but it's nice to hear your got your trip cleared up.

We have SYD-PEK-IAH in November.

Just went to check... still ok so far!

All of my flight delay/gate change messages have been coming to me in Spanish for the last couple of months.