I know that no one who frequents this forum will be surprised, but I can't believe what a pain it was to book an award flight on the phone this weekend. I wanted to book a multi-city award (RDU-LGW, FRA-RDU), and since the wonderful web site doesn't allow such a complicated transaction, I had to call the Gold line (I sure miss the CP line). I spent a total of about an hour and 15 minutes in two calls (most of the time on hold) before it was booked. I had researched it ahead of time and knew exactly which flights I wanted and knew that there was plenty of Offpeak Saver availability. The first woman I talked to sounded young and clueless. She set up the reservation but couldn't complete the booking without info from some other department and couldn't reach them after repeated attempts, so I finally said to just put the reservation on hold and I would call back later to complete it. Second call about two hours later, I reached a women who initially sounded like she knew what she was doing. She proceeded to calculate my taxes and fees and was about done when I said "Oh, and I just wanted to confirm that this was for the Off Peak Saver rate of 35,000 miles". She said she would check. This took a couple tries and many minutes on hold. She came back and said "I had to talk to a supervisor because this rate does not appear anywhere and I was not aware of it. Is this a new thing? My supervisor did not know about it either, but we will honor it since you were told on the previous call that it would be 35k miles". I said "that is absurd - you can go on your own web site right now and see the Off Peak Saver fares, which are running for Europe for most of January and February, and have been on there for several weeks" She insisted she knew nothing about them! In the end, I got the flight for 35k, but it is incredible that their system could be so clueless. What a waste of time on both parts - the only reason I wasn't more annoyed was that I could sit there and watch the Red Sox cream the Angels while I was on hold!

Without turning this into a gripe session, as I would enjoy turning it into, IMHO it appears technology and internal issues are the reason booking any award type ticket is very frustrating to do with US.

I am headed to Australia and Singapore in a few weeks for the 1st A-380 flight on SQ which is a benefit for several charities and booking "I" class (Business Class) using my US Airways miles consisted of five 45 minute phone calls to the Gold line International desk. With the airline having to use a different system to book *A awards, most of the time, if the inventory does not come up on the first page, they say there is nothing available. Unless you get an agent that goes the extra mile, like I finally did, she was able to get a creative routing that gets me there and I am thankful for that.

Here is the point, I do not know how the system works, but is there a way the computers can quickly tell the agents when the 1st available flight is when using award tickets? It just seems that if you keep asking to check other dates, depending upon the work ethic of the other person, they just say nothing is available. If the program could be redsigned to show the next available date with the inventory you want, that would be great. Otherwise, you best ought to know all the *A carriers and their routes and suggest routing alternatives to the agent.

Lastly, when my ticket came and I called one of the many *A carriers I am booked on for this routing, one of them did not show me on the right dates and the tickets issued by US did. It took five phone calls to US to sort it out and then about 3 by me with the *A carrier that had my record wrong. Finally it was sorted out.

So the point here is that most of the agents want to do it right, they just don't seem to have all the tools working correctly. If the *A program was more user friendly and displayed the first available date and the computer systems between all the *A carriers talked to each other in a more understandable language, it would make this process easier in the future.

Lastly, I called US yesterday and asked if a more direct routing was available and the agent just kept trying different dates and when I suggested using two different carriers to get me home, it just seemed like too much work for her.

The computer was designed to make life easier, not harder. Perhaps working on that would make sense. In addition, if we can't book *A award tickets on-line, then why do I have to pay the reservation service fee? That makes no sense to me in any way.

Well, off to New York today, at least I could book that online.

Cheers,
Global Express