Weird Wrong Birthdate Bug in UA booking
 

A week or two ago, I was stopped in the precheck line because my boarding pass didn't have precheck. I thought my Global Entry was expired but it wasn't. I called United and they had my birthdate off by a day. The next couple of flights were OK and then today I had the same thing happen. Anyone know what this bug is? I haven't changed my profile.

i reported this in the website thread last week. I was doing a booking…when it defaulted to the the newer style page, the birthdate showed 1 day behind the actual date (for me and companion). When it used the older style booking page, it was correct. When I tried to use the link (before booking) to change it (goes back to the MP profile fir that), birthdate shows correctly.

interestingly enough, this is a re-emerging problem, IME. I’ll be honest, haven’t really booked during the pandemic much, but IIRC, this was a problem a while ago (maybe 2-3 years ago?) during the last major website re-design, but I thought it had been fixed at some point. If someone has a bunch of extra free time on their hands, I’m sure there are posts on one of the website threads that can be dug up (I’m pretty sure I put in one of those.

I was wondering whether it might have been a display error instead of an actual data error, but seems clear now it’s the latter.

I saw this same issue a couple weeks ago.

I tried to search FT, but only found a similar issue with TK (from early 2019):
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/turk...f-one-day.html

(could this be credit card / payment processing related?)

im not sure how this would be possible. The birthdate information appears in the passenger information section when you are selecting the passengers who are traveling. You need to confirm this before you get to the payment screen. In my case, it also occurred for not just myself, but my daughter, who is also listed as a pax in my profile. Same issue. Booked multiple tickets properly for her as well in the past 3+ years.

The cause is usually a JavaScript Date object used to store and render a date. When an exact time is not stored along with the Date, which would be expected in the case of a birthday, it will default to 00:00:00 UTC. When converted to a string, it will take the browser's local timezone into account, and given that most of us live west of UTC, it would convert 2020-07-29 00:00:00 UTC to, e.g., 2020-07-28 20:00:00 EDT. The browser will thus render July 28, even if the underlying data indicates July 29.

Technically the underlying database backend contains the correct date and would remain on the correct date as long as nothing is sent back. However, if the date displayed is also part of a user-editable field in a form, the D-1 date could be sent back by the browser even if the user didn't edit it. Depending on how this is processed, the wrong date could then replace the correct date in the backend.

We generally don't see this on websites developed here in the US, as this JavaScript quirk is usually spotted during development. We see it a lot on websites that exclusively serve areas east of UTC and don't expect to deal with timezone differences (or at least don't test for that). It's weird that UA fell victim to this as well; it makes you wonder where their website development team is located.

Happened to me and my wife about 3 years ago.

This just happened to me today, seems like a common glitch.

Happened to me yesterday when doing an international award ticket booking. My birthday was listed as one day early - but my wife’s birthday was correct. Went ahead with the booking - just wondering what will happen when we get to the airport and the date doesn’t match my passport?

This has been happening for a while now. It is purely a display error, the reservation is fine.

What/where is the old style booking page?

I have been seeing this problem of late while booking just for me (from the US). Never seen this before in all these years. My birth date in the profile information is correct. I backed out before making any payments and have sent a screenshot to the UA Customer Service.

The auto-reply I got states "We care about your experience and just need some time to look into what you’ve shared with us before we can respond. In most cases, you can expect a response between 14 and 21 days. Some matters may take up to eight weeks for us to review and respond."

That should get things corrected quickly if anything is escalated to the people who develop their webpage software. :rolleyes:

Just booked a trip for three. All three had the bug on their birth dates. After purchase, the birth dates showed the correct day.

Where on the reservation can one look to confirm this?

I had the same problem today. Disappointing that this bug still comes up after 2 years. I don't see the date of birth when going through My Trips on the website, but I did notice that the correct dates were shown on the Thanks for Choosing United page that comes up immediately after purchasing.

I received this response from UA Customer Service regarding the incorrect birthdate displayed while booking on the UA site -

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Please visit united.com or call Reservations at 1-800-864-8331 for any ticketing issues including cancellation or rescheduling. Our Reservations Team will be happy to assist you with your inquiry. For a complete list of our worldwide offices, please view https://www.united.com/web/en-US/con...s/default.aspx.
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How does this answer the issue I reported and where do they think I was seeing the error if not on united.com after I clearly mentioned that in my message? Sometimes, I wonder if those responding to customer concerns are required to have any basic comprehension abilities or if they can just send one of the available form responses and mark the issue as resolved. At times, I have been asked to contact Customer Service in writing when I contacted them via phone because they cannot resolve certain issues on the phone. Always fun.

I won't be spending any more energies on this.