Since the United/Continental reservation system transition March 3, most things have gone fairly well. However, we are disappointed to share a new problem that has been giving some travelers real trouble.
In certain circumstances, ticketed flights may have dropped your pre-assigned seat assignments out of United's reservation system but still show active in agency reservation systems. We have also found, in a few cases, United has cancelled reservations in error. United has yet to determine at what point during the reservation process they are losing your booking information.
We strongly recommend that you check in online 24 hours before your flight. At that point, we encourage you to review your reservation and make sure everything is in order ... flights, seats, etc.
We are proactively attempting to reconfirm every United reservation we have booked for our travelers. To do this, we must pull up each reservation in our system and verify that United sees the same information in their Shares system. As you can imagine this is a very time consuming process involving thousands of reservations.
[Note: Robert Polk first published this report on Wednesday, March 14. On Thursday he told The Beat that "today has been better."]
Robert Polk is CEO of Polk Majestic Travel Group in Denver. These insights are excerpted from Robert's weekly newsletter, From the Desk of Robert A. Polk.