IF you have ID that says you have the same name, you can, fraudulantly. It's like any other ticket....concert/sport/bus/gift card...

The point of a ticket is an exchange for something of value. They aren't receipts. A receipt is not a ticket.

There are procedures for a lost ticket, and the more information in the reservation (and the last page of the booklet provides much of it, provided it wasn't a consolidator or issued on any stock other than UA's <016>.)

I don't recall what they are, but a LTA (lost ticket application) may be able to provide somoe of the difference back after the fact. Save the origianl receipt, as well as the new receipt for the new ticket, as both data must be on the LTA.

It's been many years since I saw a LTA...not sure if the procedure has changed (ETKTS have virtually eliminated the need for both PTA's and LTAs which cost the customer $$ <in addition to paper ticket fees.>)

It is the burden of the customer to make sure they have their tickets when the agent returns them at previous stops. Just like at the grocery store....maybe they forget to bag something up and the next guy takes it. A receip isn't going to get you another item for free. That being said, it is possible that UA pulled the ticket by mistake earlier.

Ask any ticket counter for a LTA and see if they can help you with it...it is a long form, I think in triplicate, and I don't know what the fee on it is, I think it is $100, but that may have changed. (I think the fee is deducted from refund, of newly purchased ticket, so you don't need to pay an additional fee.)

Good luck, and sorry they had a bad experience.

AFAIK, individual coupons are not valid with the receipt (so you couldn't fly with just a single coupon.)

Cheers

Can't say for sure in this case, but it's happened to me before, so that's the first thing I'd suspect. In my case, I was in mid-trip, and the coupon simply wasn't there. The only explanation that made sense was that an airline employee inadvertently removed an additional coupon. In my case, the airline (could have been UA, I don't remember) reissued it without charge, and it was no big deal (as it should have been in this case).

I have no idea why FT'ers are such a heartless lot. It seems that whenever an infrequent flier experiences a problem, it's always the passenger's fault. :rolleyes: Mistakes happen on both sides, but in a case like this, it's pretty easy for the airline to fix at no cost to anybody.

Yes, there's certainly some heartlessness here. This was a group of Chinese graduate students and their parents visting the United States (most for the first time). There were 16 of them and they had paper tickets with 5 segments in them. Each time they flew, they presented their tickets and (I presume, since it's the way I did it for 20 years "in the old days") the agent ripped out the ticket for the correct flight segment. But, it would seem, one ticket got an extra ticket ripped out. I suppose some other explanation is possible, but the odds are extremely remote. It seems obvious that in the "rush" to process 16 paper tickets, an agent messed up one booklet.

Someone claimed to have traveled in China and "learned the procedures" in advance. Well, I took a train trip across China last summer, and I can tell you that the ticket customs in China were largely incomprehensible to a non-Chinese-speaker. Sometimes they took your ticket, sometimes they held on to it. Sometimes they'd give it back to you. Bottomline is that you TRUSTED the agents to handle your tickets appropriately. That's what this group of visiting Chinese did here. And UA repaid them that trust by charging them $200 for a mistake that one of their agents made.

There has been some very helpful suggestions here -- such as the LTA -- and I will pursue that for them. I'm not terribly hopeful, however. I generally find UA customer service to be dismal (I'm going to get India if I call, right?), albeit occasionally randomly generous. I'll hope for the best.

You can try calling UA's Asian langauges hotline at 1800 426 5560 if you speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese etc. I doubt they speak those languages in India (unless I am wrong).

Tickets can fall out of the booklet if mis-handled. It may not have been the previous gate agent's fault. The fact is that accidents do happen, and sometimes they may be nobody's fault.

LAS did the right thing. You can't let someone on the plane without a ticket. Especially a paper ticket. Those must be treated like cash. Especially in LAS. There are many places in LAS where a paper ticket can be "pawned" of traded by a gambler for cash. I have seen this happen before.

So, what needs to happen is that the paper ticket needs to be reported lost. Then you can get it refunded or credited as an unused ticket.

Sorry to hear about this mis-fortune. But accidents do happen. I wouldn't blame the previous agent unless there was proof. Those paper tickets are pretty fragile.

Yes, you CAN travel under someone else's name
 

That is not true!

Let's say someone found a ticket, under someone else's name, for domestic travel on an expensive fare. You wouldn't need to be that person once past security, because nobody checks ID past that point. You could somehow get a gate pass (not so easy) or buy a refundable ticket or simply a very cheap fare to anyplace and, once "inside", become whomever the person is on the ticket.

Who is going to issue the boarding pass without ID on a paper ticket?

I think a lot of the onerous "lost ticket" rules are a vestige of the looser ID policies of the '80s and such. But there's no incentive for the airlines to now become more lenient on this stuff. After all, they really, really don't want you to have a paper ticket.

The bottomline in this case is that the real risk of someone else getting their hands on this passenger's ticket (the fare for the segment was less than $100) was a number approaching zero. It is a shame they insisted on charging the full fare at the airport. I will see what I can get them to do for him now.

Good point; I've only used a paper ticket once in the recent past and didn't consider that it might not have been enough to get past security (without a boarding pass). I honestly don't recall what went down (it was last September on an HP flight, ticketed, on paper, by UA).