Deirdre Saoirse Moen

Sounds Like Weird

PSA: Continental and United Airlines Reservation Merger

29 February 2012

United and Continental’s passenger systems merge on March 3.
If you aren’t traveling Continental or United (or have travel booked on them through another carrier or on another carrier booked through them, e.g., award travel or multi-carrier itineraries [1]) in the next month, you can probably skip the rest of this post.
As you’ve no doubt heard, the two airlines are in the process of merging. Technically, they are flying as one airline, but the passenger support systems have yet to merge.
Frequent fliers who’ve been through other mergers (e.g., Delta and Northwest or US Airways and America West) have the following recommendations:
1) Make sure you print any itineraries and receipts in full. You might want to do this for all travel you’ve got upcoming, not just travel in the next month.
2) Print paper boarding passes when you check in rather than relying on mobile check-in.
3) Do not check bags if you can possibly avoid it.
4) Print out your frequent flier details, including redeemable miles (the ones usable for awards) and status miles and segments.
5) Here are some other tips from UAInsider. Specifically, note that mileage credits will pause for a few days during integration.
If you have accounts on both United and Continental (and, until now, Continental miles never expired, so they’d still be sitting there), do this for both accounts. If you haven’t yet linked them yet, wait until after the res(ervation) system changeover (and possibly another week or two) to do so.
Here’s a good article from portfolio.com on the res system merger.
[1] Including any Star Alliance carriers or other partners.


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