GNRMatt

A few months ago I booked a roundtrip JFK-HEL-HKG through Finnair. Everything looks fine when I check the reservation on Finnair's website. However, the oddity is, when I search to purchase the ticket, it doesn't appear for sale anymore on either the dates I chose, or any other date within a one month time frame for that matter. This would be directly through Finnair and various 3rd party sites. I see all the legs (JFK-HEL, HEL-HKG, HKG-HEL, HEL-JFK) are still available for sale, but just not the complete roundtrip JFK-HKG.

Any idea why this is? Should I be concerned at all with my reservation?

Thanks for your thoughts in advance!

FlyeBye

Still available, just not on their 'improved' website. Follow the link to the old one labeled "If you prefer to pay for your booking using your Finnair Plus points or a gift voucher, please go to our old website" and you should find tickets for your JFK-HKG roundtrip.

GNRMatt

Thanks! It's strange that they'd have a non-functional website for making sales for certain routes, as well as not allowing these routes to show up in places like ITA, Expedia, etc.

intuition

Tha's an interesting observation.

Finnair have said they are combining multiple legacy backbone systems related to bookings into one "modern". They've also admitted the new system does not have nearly as many functions as the legacy systems. Not being able to combine certain fares or routes was a problem already with the old booking enginge, and now they've made it worse.
If Expedia et.al are suffering the same new limitations it seems they are now redirected to the new "modern" one.
IME though, different OTAs access different systems in Finnair, some OTAs are able to book certain routes and fares that no other seems to be able to access. No clear pattern though, best way is to try different aggregators.

FlyeBye

The question remains, why they didn't wait until it's finished or usable before launching it. They are lucky they have customers like us, that go way beyond to look how we can get our tickets, but the majority of potential is of course lost this way. Once a user is being told that no flights were found, the user is off to another airline. Not to mention the lost potential on sites like expedia where Finnair just isn't part of the search results in all these cases, so there is absolutely no visibility there for routes that they are pretty good and competetive at, just like JFK-HKG.

They (luckily!) keep the old website alive, but why do they do the alpha testing of the new site with their customers? What's the rush? Can't imagine how much potential and actually money they are loosing.

Courmisch

As I wrote before, (we will probably never know but) I strongly suspect that this has to do with internal corporate deadlines or other metrics that overrode common sense and business continuity.