Checking baggage through on separate UA operated reservations...
 

I have a question for anyone who is familiar with this kind of thing...

I had two United flights today...first from BOS-SFO then from SFO-HND. They were on separate reservations and I was under the impression that bags can be through checked with multiple reservations, if they are all United flights. So at the airport in Boston I asked for them to do this (I did not want to deal with baggage claim and security at SFO). After playing around with the computer for more than 5 min the agent said she couldn't do it, and the reason she gave was sort of strange. She said she couldn't "buy the seats" or "buy the flight" or something along those lines. I have confirmed tickets on both flights and had already checked in online. Is there any reason why a ticket agent couldn't through check bags?

As written on the United website: United will transfer bags to a connecting flight on your United itinerary, or on a separate itinerary that includes a Star AllianceTM partner airline flight, if the connecting flight is scheduled to depart within 13 hours after arriving at the connection city.

I suspected she either didn't know how to do it or just wanted to get me out of the way for the next person in line!

Welcome to FT, jonsha!

Apparently SHARES makes this difficult for agents, and it sounds like you got an agent who didn't want to or didn't know how to deal with it, either due to lack of training or incompetence.

I am sure there are others who will add to this - but apparently it's not so easy to check bags on a UA-UA itinerary - for some reason it is easier if the itinerary is UA-*A verseus UA-UA. Of course UA has outsourced so many positions at non-hubs it's hard to be sure of anything these days....

For UA-*A, it can be done within few mouse clicks, but for UA-UA it needs to be done in SHARES, experienced agent commonly works it around by adding a SFO-HND segment to your BOS-SFO record, print the tag and then remove that extra segment, or other way around(by working on the SFO-HND record instead) . In case the segment they are trying to add is sold out, that's probably why they mention"can't buy the flight".
Based on what you have mentioned, I feel the agent is pretty accommodating, at least the response is not "there is nothing we can do, go claim the bag and recheck it at SFO"

Thanks everyone for the quick replies. I see it's not the agent's fault, but I'm amazed that there is no easier way to do this seemingly simply thing...and that the ability to through check bags would be affected by a flight being sold out! Oh well, it's a 4 hour connection so not like I'm going to miss my flight.

I've done this before from OGG. Had a very patient and friendly agent who had a heck of a time doing it. I think he was pmUA because he made a comment that in the old days this was much easier.

It was even more difficult for my travel partner because of something with the format of his name being different in the two separate PNRs. Took a long time, but definitely appreciated the agent's patience!

My Experience with this Issue
 

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/26256757-post163.html

Requires the agent to post dummy segments in one of the reservations in order to get the bag tag to print out. My guess is that there was no inventory available on the flight to allow the agent to post the dummy segments. Agent could have called inventory management to ask for permission to temporarily oversell the flight.

We had an identical experience in KOA some time ago. Good thing we were checking in our bags 2 hours prior to departure!!

Yes, this is just one of reasons SHARES is so disliked.

And SFO is probably the easiest UA hub to exit and recheck.

It still cracks me up that FTers get so far into the weeds that SHARES is widely known for its many faults. Wonder where the calculus tipping point would be for UA to update/replace SHARES, and wonder if said hypothetical update would fix this baggage check problem OP mentions.

Perhaps because it directly impacts the customer experience in so many critical ways, including dropped segments, failed ticketing, cumbersome IRROPS rebooking, missed upgrades, and inability to check a bag through on separate UA tickets.

According to this verbiage, UA was technically correct in denying you.

The UA flight was not on your itinerary, and the separate itinerary clause refers to partner airlines, not UA itself. ;)

I just did this in HNL and the agents were great but it took about 20 minutes and a second agent to get it done. She tried using Aero and it wouldn't work so had to get help having someone sell the space in native Shares. We laughed about it and I was fine - I was three hours early and this didn't take a big bite out of my UClub time.

Replacement will never happen. There is simply too much going on and you can never get a new system tested enough that it will be better than a system you've been using for decades.

Updates are more reasonable, but even then the risk profile of going deep into the depths of a critical piece of software is quite high. How much damage did UA do to itself with the horrible systems integration at merger time?

There was no real integration. They simply threw away United's old system and stuck with Continental's, against the recommendation of their CTO/CIO (who was fired for his opposition to Jeff's opinion).