stinger

So, no problem at all with the rest of the tickets from LIM-EWR-YYZ-YEG, all was good and arrived last night.

At no point did I or anyone travelling with me make any changes to our tickets.

I had confirmed the ticket with LA ahead of time when booking our seats and even had the PNR on my app on the phone, as luck would have it, the app needed to reboot when I was checking in and I lost the PNR. Pulled it up from an email for the LA staff. The LA staff kept saying that somebody changed the ticket and it was due to the UA flight from EWR (inbound) was delayed. I showed her that the flight was not delayed and was airborne. She called United and United apparently (I don't understand Spanish) told her that everything was fine on their end. Then she told me it was the AC flight that had thrown everything off as our YYZ-YEG flight had moved 10 minutes from 16:55 departure to 17:05. I called AC and talked to them and they said absolutely not, they have no control over a 016 ticket and would not have changed anything. The Air Canada phone agent also said he could see we have been checked in on all of our segments so there should not have been any issue boarding.

By this time, the flight is 20 minutes from departure and I had got nowhere in the previous 75 minutes as we arrived early. At this point, knowing this was the last LA flight out of IQT I asked what it would take to get the four of us on the plane as we needed to make our connection in LIM and there were only later flights.

I did wonder, what would have happened if they would have denied boarding and I would have missed the rest of our flights, who's responsibility would it have been to get us home?

To answer the questions above, I booked separate tickets on Avianca from LIM-CUZ and another separate ticket on LA from CUZ-IQT.

I will begin the fun of trying to get a refund tomorrow when I have some time to contact UA. I do have receipts for the additional tickets I purchased.

Will advise the outcome. Otherwise great trip with great service on all other flights. Even the 6 hour layover at the Sumaq lounge in LIM wasn't bad, even though it is a bit of a zoo with the other lounge being refurbished.

Thanks for all the advice and info, always something new to learn!

jsloan

That's almost certainly what it was. A schedule change like that can cause downline segments to move to standby while the change is validated. During that process, the partner airlines will sometimes drop the reservation because the ticket appears to be invalid.

Did the AC flight number change? That would likely have required a UA ticket reissue, which would have needed to be communicated to LA, as the ticket numbers would have changed. If LA didn't get that update, they'd have tickets in their system that showed "exchanged," which can't be used for travel.

stinger

jsloan

That's still probably the culprit, although in that case I wouldn't expect UA would need to reissue the tickets. But it's possible that LA's systems got notice that their flight segments were no longer confirmed (because of the schedule change) and then they never got back into sync.

mozilla

I hope this is not the (single) cause. If a mere 10-minute schedule change would cause the kind of ticket issues OP described, there would've been a lot more stories to read about this on FT. The explanation that the agent gave after UA confirmed that everything was in order could very well have been of the MOLA-kind (AC apparently denied what the agent said). This kind of change does not require ticket reissue, probably even no revalidation, so really shouldn't cause problems like this.

Unfortunately, without knowing the details of the ticket/coupon it's hard to tell what caused this. It might very well have been wrongly ticketed on LA from the start for some reason. Again, the airline website showing the PNR is no guarantee that the associated ticket is trouble-free, and I'm not sure how OP "confirmed the ticket with LA" without actually confirming the PNR.

PTahCha

Realistically, even though it was a 016 stock ticket, LA should be the one issuing refund, since presumably you had a valid ticket to travel but somehow the record was out of sync on LA's end.

stinger

So called UA yesterday and spoke to an agent who directed me the complete everything online, completed everything and attached boarding passes for the flight as well as receipt for the payment so will wait and see what happens. Will advise the outcome.

stinger

cfischer

^