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.

I really don't understand why anyone would vent /rant first instead of call UA first. If UA didn't rectify things after, then post & let the FT community help from there.

Can you post the Chinese email you received here?

The OP was at 12:18 CT. He had time to post three messages before he actually called UA, only to find his call answered in less than a minute and UA well on the way to rebooking him for something caused by another carrier.

Yes, it would have been nice to find the email in English, but it's hardly crazy that the system selected Chinese given that the operating carrier is a Chinese carrier. It is also clear that receiving the email triggered OP to do what he presumably would have done had it been in English.

This thread is about a solution looking for a problem. Why not have called UA first and then posted if there was a problem?

Sure it is. Where do they get the email address? From your profile, which also contains your country of residence. Not to mention that the flight was merely transiting China. Of the possible languages associated with the booking (American English, Chinese, Australian English), Chinese was the poorest choice.

FT would be empty if people did that. But in this case, it seems the original complaint was the Chinese email, not the cancellation, and calling United wouldn't fix that.

This seems to be the m.o., especially on this forum, as of late.
Instead of making a simple phone call (which was answered w/i 1 min by an agent that rates an "A") and getting the itin straightened out, the "Friendly Skies" are falling thread is manufactured.

Air China/China Air (who cares) obviously sent the e-mail to the OP via UAL and he knew that he needed to call res. Once things were straighten out to his satisfaction his NEW thread could have provided the listening audience with the satisfactorily results.

I don't care if I get an e-mail in Swahili from an airline, once I go to my reservations and see a schedule change the first thing I'm doing is calling the booking airline. The last thing I'm doing is posting superfluous, acerbic comments prior to making a simple call to UA res.

If you had a paid ticket with a stopover in PEK I would ask UA to make that happen for you. There should be other partner airlines they can work with and w/ a C-class ticket there should be some sort of availability.

+1

I'd save my outrage until it was confirmed I actually had reason to be outraged.

If OP had posted, "I got an email in Chinese from UA, but I don't read Chinese.... what should I do?" My advice would have been the same. Call UA.

But, to make this out as some major fail isn't the case.

Really? Have customer service expectations slipped so far?

You are a very trusting person. My SOP to receiving any email from any source in a foreign language is to report it as SPAM or phishing and delete it without opening. If United is sending these emails, it's exactly the same as sending no notification at all.

The fact that it allegedly came from United is a red herring. It's trivial to spoof a return address.

The profile also includes one's language preference. Therefore, I disagree with making excuses for the UA system sending an email in Chinese.

And United MileagePlus has had us at our home address in MN since we joined 8+ years ago, ditto for CO OnePass (both ex Plats) for 5+ years.

One of my coworkers is from China, and she read the email earlier. What's strange is that it was written as a confirmation of my cancellation, and the bottom of the HTML version (I only saw the text version earlier) has one line in English at the bottom: "This one-time e-mail was sent to confirm your ticket cancellation on united.com." I received a PM from someone who had received a similar email, and in his/her case there apparently was a fraudulent cancellation originating from an IP address in China.

So, keep an eye on your Air China itins.

Then I'd have to go back to my coworker & have her vet it for personal info. She's gone home for the day.

Good intuition, I will run the headers through SpamCop.

Apparently.

Came from coair.com at 74.202.77.44, if reported as spam, reports would only go to [email protected], so the email appears to be legit and to originate within UA/CO.

tw telecom holdings, inc. TWTC-NETBLK-9 (NET-74-202-0-0-1) 74.202.0.0 - 74.203.255.255
Continental Airlines TWTC-CONTINENTAL (NET-74-202-77-0-1) 74.202.77.0 - 74.202.77.255

My United.com email notification preferences randomly got set to Spanish about 2 months ago. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar glitch set yours to Chinese.

That's a rather narrow world view. Calling UA seems like a more reasonable response.

It's actually the view of someone who arrives at an airport 1/2-way around the world only to find no aircraft because there's no flight.

Or almost as bad, but perhaps more galling, waiting a week to call in and finding out the there is no longer any open award space on CA and that there is nothing UA can do to force CA to do anything, so they redeposit your miles as a refund.

All my flight updates have been coming in Spanish, too! Does not matter though because I get faster updates from tripit, and in English! I also get the occasional marketing letter from ual.com in Japanese but that may be because I had a mailing address in Japan for seven years.

OP, really glad that everything worked out for you and hope you have a great trip. Granted things are not perfect with United, but it has to be challenging working with so many different airlines in a large network and some of those airlines change their flights, timing, and flight numbers pretty frequently. I had difficulty checking in for an ET flight issued by UA because ET had changed the flight number shortly after the ticket was issued. These minor inconveniences are nothing to me compared to the advantage of earning and redeeming across the Star network.

^

Saturday my wife lost her f/c seat on an RJ to LAX due to downsizing by United Airlines (actually Skywest).

United Airlines (actually a new t/a) gave her a b/p for Eva Air and told her to pass the ticket counter @ the Bradley terminal and head straight to the gate. WRONG,TSA sent her back to Eva.

United Airlines checked her bags all the way thru to KKC (Khon Kaen) via BKK and informed her that her overweight luggage would be NO PROBLEM as she was a 1K/Gold BIG shot. Actually TG put the brakes on this theory after she cleared customs and rechecked in at the domestic terminal. Other factors made this work out in the end, however.

So, as stated above, minor inconveniences will happen, and three languages were involved (English, Chinese, and Thai) but when my wife finally arrived at her village all she could do was rave about her flights and the service extended to her.

Just making it half way around the world, on her own, with the Star network looking out for her, every step of the way, and with all of the recent headlines of people not being able to get straight answers about their loved one's, makes me glad that I stuck with UA the past 18 years. ^

Horrible! Mandarin or Canton?

This thread is like going to a restaurant, getting the bill, being charged for an additional steak and then going on Yelp from your phone while there writing a horrible review and then asking the waitress to take the mistake off the bill.

Ouch. I initially had that for my return from OZfest. So glad i changed to TG earlier

Not quite. More like getting a bill in Chinese in a NYC steakhouse, and have to ask the server to translate for you.

It's an e-mail--there's no difference. Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible dialects, not actually different languages. That's why you often see Chinese movies subtitled in Chinese.

Got it. Like Arabic and Hebrew.

Simplified or traditional?

Si mi muchacho....it's a bad sign, because, the Spanish notifications presage step 2 of those "changes that you will like." Next up, UA MP will claim - and become -

:-: mejor en su clase :-: