Qualiflyer - No more online award bookings at short notice?

I just tried to book an award flight DUS-ZRH-OTP-ZRH-DUS on qualiflyer.com for next week, and got the reply "Sorry, we are unable to issue tickets within the requested timeframe, please contact nearest Qualiflyer Service Center". I checked on Galileo, there is wide availability in the Z award booking class on all of the requested flights. OTP (Bucharest) is an e-ticket, destination, to which I easily had award tickets booked online in the past, at short notice of 2 or three days. Now the system doesn't allow me to book online even five days in advance. Award requests for later dates are still processed, as showed a test with a fictionary date in December.

Booking offline through the call center wouldn't be a problem, if there wasn't the ridiculous fee of €45 for bookings of less than 14 days before departure. This of course makes the rule "Online reservations are not subject to the short-notice booking fee." absolutely useless.

IMHO, this is a cheap trick to cash in on the extra fee. They must be pretty desparate to make some extra cash before the big Qualiflyer transition.

This would be very bad news ! I made my last sucessfull last minute booking two weeks ago or so. This is one of the best benefits of the QF programme that make me fly SWISS and not use FD or LH and all of my (many) reward flight are usually booked < 48 hours before take off.

E-tickets are not needed, if there is no E-ticketing for your distination the ticket can be picked up at the airport. It might be different flying from a non CH destination...

I hope this is not the start of a lot of bad news in the transition to the new TravelClub!

PA

I just tried to book muc-zrh on Nov. 15th. It worked, but I did not really book. Did you get the message before having the possibility of choosing a flight or after confirming the pax and credit card information?

Ok, I've got it.

Trying your trip next week, I got the same error message. Starting the trip at MUC is fine. So, maybe Qualiflyer has something against NRW and prefers Bavaria :-), as we have a similiar accent to the Swiss (I think I am remembering one of Rudi's remarks...)

I am glad this is nothing structural !
I have seen this glitch when the system was out or being serviced but never noticed discrimination based on language (although one can argue CH-German and Bavarian being a language or a speech defect :-).