Here is a bit of a strange question that I thought I would throw out to the group to see if anyone knew of the best way to go forward. We finally got our 7500 Turkish Miles&Smiles to Hawaii award booked (more details on that upcoming in a future post). But apparently there is a problem booking a ticket for 7 passengers on one PNR. I don’t know if that was a Turkish problem, a United problem, a problem with the knowledge of this particular agent, or some other problem, but in any case, we are now booked on 2 separate PNRs of 5 and 2 people.
Can you combine 2 PNRs
So my question is can you combine 2 United PNRs? Ideally I would prefer us all to be on the same PNR, mostly in case of IRROPS where we have to worry about them splitting us up. The other problem that we have is that the Turkish Airlines agent split out my 2 youngest kids on a PNR by themselves (of course). The tickets booked so I’m guessing that she set them up as an “adult” fare in the system (or it wouldn’t have booked if they showed up as unaccompanied minors). I did have to supply their birthdates, so I’m wondering if there will be some sort of problem when we try to check-in. We have flown before on separate PNRs due to our large family but if I have the choice I keep 1 adult on each PNR, but they didn’t ask me this time.
My thought would be that the worst case scenario would be that we wouldn’t be able to check-in online and we’d have to check in at the gate, where the agent would see that there are no unaccompanied minors and that would be that. This is a domestic flight (to Hawaii), so there shouldn’t be any type of immigration or visa problems.
I know a few years ago I booked a flight on Delta with my daughter, and I had to book it separately (I think to use multiple Delta gift cards, or maybe one ticket was award and one paid?). I remember the Delta phone agent “linking” the records somehow and we didn’t have any trouble past that.
The only other thing we’d normally worry about would be selecting kid’s meals for the kids but hey – United doesn’t serve a meal on a 10 hour flight from Chicago to Hawaii so we got that going for us, I guess 🙂
What do you think? Anything that we can or should do to combine 2 United PNRs?
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
UA can probably still link/cross reference the PNRs, but I wouldn’t bother worrying about getting it done at all. UA may inhibit self-check-in for the children’s PNR, but linking the PNRs generally doesn’t make a difference for such situations. The big differences in some situations like this may be that PreCheck boarding passes may come for some in the travel party but not for all in the travel party since each PNR submitted to the government will kick back separately from the USG; the status benefits/priority applicable to one PNR won’t benefit the other PNR passengers. Enjoy your trip with the two PNRs.
I have a revenue UA flight pre sandwiched in between an award UA positioning flight. Agent has linked the 2 in the notes but it is still 2 PNR. Agent says we can check in for the main flight while checking into the positioning flight at the desk. The 2 PNRs cannot actually be combined, unlike with AA.
Call United … explain situation and they will put a note on the kids PNR and link them . This is especially good to do if flight cancels/protection etc. how old are the 2 kids ?
PNRs cannot be combined or “linked”. The only thing that can be done is a manual note that references the other PNR. There is nothing about this that affects any automated process whatsoever. It is only potentially useful if a human is looking in one PNR and can see that those people are traveling with people in another PNR. It it not of much value in most situations.
Glad you got the 7500 point deal. I was just trying east coast to west coast and fed them via email the flights. They showed fine on United and Expert Flyer. Turkish air kept coming back and back saying the last leg, SF0-LAX was not available. It was. It just got to Lax at 15 min. past midnight. Turkish would not book it. I just paid 12.5K and called it a day.
Lucky you that you could find 7 tickets to Hawaii like that. I could not find 2 in June.
Any way you can speak to what ended up happening? I’m in the exact same boat with my 5yo daughter coming up in March. Would love to learn from your experience.
Thanks in advance.
We ended up canceling the flights due to COVID :-(. I don’t remember exactly but I don’t think we were able to combine the 2 United PNRs