I don’t think it was the gate agent’s fault. She waved him through.
The clerk who refused to honor the second portion of his ticket and refused explanation was the jerk.
There was no second portion of his ticket. It had been cancelled. Electronic ticketing has advantages and drawbacks and this is one of those drawbacks. However, if the gentleman had email on his cell, he would have received the notification upon landing and could have tried to resolve the issue before leaving the airport in Florida or before trying to make the return flight. However, the gate agent, allowed him on when there was a problem scanning his boarding pass and she/he assumed the scan was successful and he/she was the weak point in the process.
“I don’t think it was the gate agent’s fault. She waved him through. The clerk who refused to honor the second portion of his ticket and refused explanation was the jerk.”
The second Agent can only go by what the computer tells them.
The fault lies with the first station.
If the count doesn’t match the boarding passes cleared, they have a problem. They have one boarding pass that didn’t register to match the count, so the flight goes.
The error lies in clearing the flight in the computer, before reconciling the extra boarding pass. This would be the fault of the gate agent, or the sup it was referred to.
In the old days, it would have been a fairly simple matter of reopening the PNR, assigning the segment to the original ticket number, and then making a written note of the transaction. Cleared tickets then match the departure count, problem solved.