jsloan

That's certainly understandable. I guess my advice is to avoid getting into fights with CS reps.

This information is very definitely not supposed to be public. If you start reading from the comments, you may run into the worst kind of agent -- one who's curious enough to wonder how you knew what was there. and that person may start asking questions: "I had this passenger today who read his itinerary comments back to me. I thought those were private?"

Lux Flyer

Might not have an IT security line per se, but I do know they have an email direct to corporate security who would probably look into this if an agent came to them saying a passenger was quoting internal information from the PNR (and eventually get it back to IT to shut this down). Of course, I fear it's not a matter of if that will happen, but when

Calling MPSC means little for expecting it to be better, given a large amount of it is staff off-shore, especially at certain times of day. Whereas in reservations/premier/global services they staff with US based agents around the clock (and supplement with off-shore agents), there are times of the day when MPSC is only off shore agents (ie US-based MPSC agents have certain times of day that simply aren't included in their bid). I've had reservations agents even mention being frustrated with MPSC when they have to call them, because they don't comprehend it is a UA employee calling to get something fixed and instead treat them like they are the MP customer. I'm not sure of the exact time, but I'm pretty sure I've been told 8pm central is when all the US-based agents are done staffing MPSC for the day, not sure what time US-based agents resume taking calls in the morning.

1KChinito

My record shows 9 am to 7 pm Mountain Time when U.S. based agents answer phone at Mileage Plus Service Center. I do not remember where I got that information, most likely from a MPSC US based agent, that was years ago though. Things may have changed by now.

MarkyMarc

"Anyone know what "** PRES PLUS **" means in the CPPC line?"

I've got this on my res tomorrow but I don't have that card. I do have the United Club card. Since this is part of the upgrade hierarchy/tie breakers, I'm going to say this is added by the system with you have the Club Card or Pres Plus based on below priorities:

Waitlist priority for all flights

• PlusPoints upgrades and MileagePlus Upgrade Awards
• Premier status of the traveler*
• Fare class
• Chase United MileagePlus Club cardholders and Presidential Plus cardholders
• United Corporate Preferred participants
• United Chase Cardmembers with $25,000 in annual spending
• Date and time of request

Gate45

I'm confused as to what this accomplishes. If memory serves, it's been almost a year since UA changed the app where it no longer shows the upgrade list under that scenario.

milepig

I recently checked a PNR mostly out of curiosity. I had a case where due to an UA error they needed to reprice an itin (the FCCs weren't properly applied). The result was a comedy of errors - the original price was gone, all the seats in the bucket were taken, it involved a leg on TK, it went on and on. I was on the phone for about an hour being bounced around while they worked to untangle the mess. The PNR records showed, line my line, what they'd had to do. At least a hundred lines. Some of these things aren't simple, and I learned something about the UA processes. They had to reprice to the original fare with a supervisor override, open up seats, put back my FCCs which they had been marked as "used" but they weren't applied and then apply to the new ticket, cancel and rebook the TK leg, even the fraud department checked in to approve it all. Fascinating. In the end the phone agent said "I think its all sorted, I even got your original seats, I'm hitting the button" and breathed a sigh of relief when it actually went through.

I could see each of these steps in the PNR.

chitraveler1975

Does anyone know what location codes dpg, ptk and nfb mean in pnr? Good actors in dpg and ptk and nasty notes from incompetent agents in nfb. Thanks!!!

lincolnjkc

Conjecture...
I find it interesting that two of those (NFB, a non-commercial/nonflightable airport code and PTK, a non-commercial airport) are in the greater Detroit area so it could be an agent assigned to the (now virtual?) Detroit call center.

The other one maps to Alaska.

My guess is that UA has pulled these as psuedo-city codes (PCCs) for either physical facilities or virtual reporting chains/management units... HDQ and WHQ are more obvious PCCs and WEE appears to be used for automation

fumje

Are you seeing these codes attached to remarks or somewhere else?

The format for remarks I have seen that are attributable to an agent is like


In that example would ABC be the location code?

lincolnjkc

ABC = The "agent" (either human or automation)'s city code. For airport agents this will be the airport code, for other agents this will be a psuedo city code (eg HDQ, WHQ, WEB, ...)

The next two sets of two characters are IIRC the role the agent is signed in as and the agent's sine (I think SU, for example=Supervisor, but I may be getting myself confused with another system, and the other two character "sine" uniquely ID the agent within that city code... Agents in who have been in the same place long enough may have their first and last initial (e.g. mine would be LK) -- otherwise it's random.

The 6-digit hexadecimal LNIATA (a6b1d9) is the teletype address of the specific terminal used to make the entry.

That said with Aero and Jet I'm not clear if they actually use the agent's sine or if theres a common sine used (in which case someone would have to look at the audit logs in Aero and/or Jet to see who did what where..mi don't have any samples that would help me determine that

fumje

Great info, thanks.

I'm not familiar with that sense of the word "sine" (agent's sine, two character sine, common sine) — is that jargon for something like a call sign? I only think of trigonometry.

From the fair amount of variation I can find in sines (assuming I'm using that correctly; the third code) attached to various remarks, I think they probably are indeed unique to an agent, although I don't see examples of same PCC/role + different sine, which I imagine would be conclusive. However, I do get the impression that with Aero and Jet there are other audit trails not included in remarks, as I have had some agents make significant changes without generating any remarks.

I had initially assumed all remarks from "WEB" were added by some kind of automation, but actually I see sometimes they have different sign-in role codes (usually SU, not always) and different "sines" (usually BK, but also not always). I then wondered if there might be some human generated remarks place-located to WEB (web services??), although I suppose maybe more likely they just identifies different computer/automation systems.

Anyway, I'm rambling now.

Lux Flyer

"Sine" is essentially an identifier indicating a specific individual who is performing the action. I'd say think of it like their signature. Everyone at a location is assigned a unique "Sine" which is two characters long as a combination of numbers 1-9 and letters A-Z (Math wizzes can figure out how many each location can have then). "WEB" is a location identifer used for a sine, and mostly related to automation, but many other locations are also automated. WEB, obviously being something coming from the website. The different sines for web users likely indicate a different application doing the specific action. The other codes like SU, GS, PD, etc. are essentially permission levels which dictate what a specific user's identifier is allowed to do.

Not necessarily true that the airport agent's code will always be the airport code. Mentioned above, there is a limit to the number of unique sines for each location. So some of the larger airports (hubs) or other locations who have more employees needing access than available sines for a single city will also have a pseudo city code. I think when they get this large, they start dividing those with supervisor access to different city codes, so ORD might be standard gate agents whereas CHI might be a supervisor for ORD. That also allows them to ensure everyone still has a unique identifier even when using shared applications like Jet or Aero [they don't necessarily enter their sine anymore, but rather it is attached to their company profile and automatically gets entered through a SSO mechanism).

Also the city codes directory might not necessarily reflect the most current assignments of a code, since the software was from Continental's days. As I understand it, among other interesting city code assignments still in place, there is still one assigned that was originally for Northwest employees working in SHARES.

Edit: To also add, even though some systems may use a "WEB" or "HDQ" or other sine that doesn't identify a specific individual that may just be the agent using a web based interface to do the action. There is a different history section of the PNR (which this viewer apparently doesn't show) that records that data. So even though it might say the "WEB" did this, in the comments the web interface records into the history it will say it was requested by "ABC Q9". This also happens with things like actions you or I might take on the app or website. Instead of the web interface recording a sine (since we don't have one) it would record the MP number that was logged in when the action was done, or possibly a GUID which can identify a specific session and actions that were done during that session if there was no one logged in.

fumje

Thanks, more great info.

Now that I know what these codes mean, I am kind of amazed by the variety of locations they have. Most are quite cryptic, and I have no idea where they could be.

Aside: I don't identify as a math whiz, but with A-Z & 1-9 (true? rather than 0-9?) there are 1225 = 35 × 35 possible unique sines for any location. If it were A-Z & 0-9, there would be 1296 possible sines.

lincolnjkc

I don't know SHARES well enough to say for certain* (I am only a passenger after all... I'm probably not supposed to know any of this ) it wouldn't surprise me if 0 is restricted, particularly as the first character, as it seems in some platforms from the same era [like SABRE] 0 is used as a wildcard of sorts, (e.g. if you've "assigned" a terminal to a flight instead of using flight 1234 over and over and over you can use flight 0 so you don't have to remember which flight #)

The cripticality of a PCC is factor of there being only a finite number of three character combinations and having to avoid collisions with "real" airport codes and also all of the other pseudo-city codes. Back in the day essentially every "automated" (SABRE or SODA/SHARES or Apollo or WorldSpan or DATAS or...) travel agency was also assigned a PCC -- not sure how many of those are still in use, but in UA's case it would make sense to grab 'real' airport codes for airports UA is unlikely to ever serve [see the Detroit-area noncomercial airports a few posts up]

*- Despite one time in mid/late 2012 I had a supervisor in ORD say "You know SHARES!?! Why don't you just do it?" while passing me the keyboard and flipping the monitor around... Pretty sure she wasn't supposed to do that... And my finger prints are neither on that keyboard or PNR

lincolnjkc

So curiosity got the better of me and I looked at a few of my PNRs and looking at what comments are associated with what events I'm drawing some conclusions

WEB SU BK = Booking transactions (BooKing?)
WEB SU EU = Upgrade transactions (specifically PlusPoints, I don't have any CPU-related PNRs to look at) (Elite Upgrade?)
WEB SU AD = Buy up offers (ADditional revenue?)

WEE PD AA, WEE PD AC, WEB PD 99 = Delay/Cancel/IROPS but I can't discern the differences (interesting note: these are the only PD level codes). There also seems to be limited rhyme or reason to the LNIATA addresses (a lot are DC2xxx but there are others scattered somewhat randomly.... I'd be curious to know how these are allocated (is a specific server instance assigned its own LNIATA or do they all use a pool of addresses).

Also another suposition on why 0 or 1 may not be used in sines -- possible confusion with O and I.

Also to amend my previous answer