Yes, I received 2 separate confirmation emails (shortly after changing the city pairing) each with a unique PNR and unique ticket # (the 13 digit # starting with 016) at the bottom of the email.

 

I'm getting confused, as it appears you were ticketed but earlier in the first post you mentioned the ticketing was not successful due to a name change (which sounded odd). So, after ticketing, the ticket was cancelled -- by whom?, name issue might prevent ticketing but after ticketing it will not cause the ticket to be cancelled. So, we are missing critical information. Additionally, it would be very much out of place to a an UA employee to outright state UA violated the CoC. There are some deeper issues here, UA agent will sometimes offer simpler, incomplete reasons to get the customer off the phone.

 

The original flight (MRS-BRU-ADD-CPT) was ticketed (and showed up on ET.com) for both my wife and I. When I called to make the change to originate out of GVA (and do routing GVA-ADD-CPT) the agent made the change fairly quickly (kept same PNR). When I received a confirmation email shortly after the change had been made, the confirmation email had the new routing (GVA-ADD-CPT), same PNR and a 13-digit ticket # at the bottom (starting with 016). This was for both me and my wife's bookings. But, when I went on ET.com and put my wife's PNR in that UAL gave me for ET's segments, ET's booking still showed the original routing (MRS-BRU-ADD-CPT) and the status had changed to "PENDING" (vs. confirmed and ticketed).
When I called ET about this, they said to call UAL. When I called UAL, they said everything (including the ticketing) was good and showed accurate (GVA-ADD-CPT) on their end and to give it 48 hours to process with ET.

After 48 hours, ET.com still showed the original booking (MRS-BRU-ADD-CPT) and pending, so I called UAL back and they got a supervisor on the phone who said they would look into. Then, after an hour the supervisor called me back and said there was an issue because of a name change. They were accusatory at first, as if I asked to have a name change on the booking (I did not) - it's been my wife the whole time. They said my wife's middle name was added (NOT BY ME) to the reservation and this was causing the problem. The supervisor said they would have to investigate who added this middle name but I think ultimately understood that it wasn't my fault.

He then said my options were to cancel the ticket and take the refund and try to rebook but this could be risky if there was no inventory or I could travel on a different date. That's when I started getting frustrated, because I said neither of those options were acceptable to me. He put me on with his supervisor who apologized and said there was nothing she could do; but that there was a mistake and unfortunately United could not control ET's award seat release. She said had it been on UAL she would have overbooked the award space but is unable to do that for other carriers. When I asked for her supervisor, she said she was the last line in that facility and that I should fill out a complaint form on united.com.

A few hours later, I get an email from United stating my wife's reservation had been cancelled. When I called to inquire about it, the supervisor told me she could see it was cancelled but there was no reason as to why and that it's usually cancelled at the request of the customer. I informed her that I never requested to cancel the ticket and asked her to make note of that in the file, which she said she did. I hung up with her, and then a short while later, I get a random email from UA with a confirmation for my wife for travel GVA-CAI-ADD (On Egyptair). A couple hours later, another email comes through stating this reservation has been cancelled. So I can only assume someone was trying to make something work behind the scenes. I had had enough by this time, so I wrote United a customer complaint form and that's where I'm at now...

oh and the miles were never redeposited in my account; apparently I have to ask for that to happen - right now they told me it's held as a travel credit.

Sorry for the long winded reply - but I tried to break it down sequentially and to something that hopefully makes sense....

I'll give UAL some time to reply to the complaint form and see what they say. I'm hopeful this is handled by a United employee and not a vendor (which is unfortunately what the reservation/help desk people are).

Ultimately, I'll probably just end up booking a revenue ticket using Chase points if it can't be resolved; so it's not the end of the world, but it is certainly frustrating and on principle I would like to know what happened as to how one ticket (mine) was successful in being changed and the other (my wife's) was not.

 

File a complaint with who?

 

At United.com/customercare

 

As WineCountryUA already noted, the fact that your wife in fact had a ticket which UA apparently canceled does change the analysis, though I share his confusion as to what actually happened.

If you do file a complaint with anyone, my suggestion is that you make it as concise as possible.

 

Who cancelled is not even clear?

Most common this would if there was only 1 new award space and only 1 PNR was successfully changed. Causing the system to chock for lack of additional new award space.