Greetings
Three years ago we travelled with the Star Alliance and, on a couple of occasions, found it necessary to change dates, times and member airlines, e.g. fly with United instead of with US Airways on a different day to the one ticketed. This is one of the best features of the Star Alliance - if they cancel a flight and have something you don't like, you can move to another airline with a better schedule when more than one offer services between the cities. I know that if I'd wanted to fly to a different city, I'd have paid a penalty, but in 2005 changes of one or more of date, time or airline between the same cities was fine and free.
Now it's 2007, 2008 and we're booked to travel from Orlanda via Charlotte to Nashville. We chose United code-share flights operated by US Airways (as flying United means Disney World will deliver our bags to the plane!) but the second leg has now vanished - well, US Air are still flying it but United don't list their version of it any longer. So United have moved us to two earlier flights leaving Orlando several hours earlier. Easy, said I - leave Orlando-Charlotte on United, and shift Charlotte-Nashville from United to the US Air flight we had originally. But my travel agent (Flight Centre, Australia) says we'll have to pay a fee per (paper) ticket to have them reissued. The tickets state "valid Star Alliance only" not "valid United only", and a couple of the 14 sectors are already wrong due to timetable changes.
Can this be right?
Thanks in anticipation,
Gary
