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There are certain things that make you scratch your head and wonder why a company chose the more complicated, less reliable way of doing things. United's passport scan system for updating passport details is one of those head scratchers. Why, rather than simply having a passenger input the new passport number and expiration, does United insist on scanning or uploading a passport photo, which then (at least in our case, and the case of some other passengers) simply doesn't work?
It would be one thing if this was a new system that hadn't had all the glitches worked out, but I can see online complaints, such as this Reddit thread, that are three years old, so United apparently doesn't care enough to fix something that for years has prevented or at least delayed some passengers from receiving their boarding pass.
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What to Do if Your Passport Scan/Photo Prevents You from Receiving a United Boarding Pass
If you don't see your updated passport number after uploading your passport photo or scan, you may want to try the check-in process again with a different browser, according to the United representative I spoke with. If you still encounter problems and the system doesn't provide a boarding pass to you, call United at 800-864-8331 and mention that you're trying to reach the Travel Ready Center (there's no direct number for it) because your passport details didn't get correctly processed from the scan. In our case, the representative made an internal call to the Travel Ready Center, and manually verified the passport photo we submitted, then emailed us our son's boarding pass. Although we've recommended avoiding long airline hold times via chat or text, in this instance United's chat help wasn't able to help us, so we did have to call the 800 number above to get this rectified.
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