NHFL9

Trying to book my a trip for next August. I find "O" class availability on AF for all sectors and go to ticket on-line but get the "Sorry, a flight just sold out..." error message. So I call SMS yesterday and have them put it together. They get all the flights in a PNR and try to ticket it, but no dice. They go through two support desks and advise that they cannot ticket it at this time and they are putting it on a 48 hour "courtesy hold" (not sure why it's a courtesy since the issue isn't on my end) and to call back tomorrow.

So I call back today and the agent informs me that "AF cannot confirm the availability so we can't ticket it, there's nothing that can be done, we can't hold these tickets forever." I tried explaining that the "O" inventory shows available and yesterday the agent confirmed availability on all flights put the PNR on hold. She says "I see that but we can't ticket it or force the availability, there's just nothing that can be done."

I am going to try to call back again and see if I can get a more helpful agent later on, but before I do does anyone have any pointers or similar experiences? My account still shows all of the segments on hold. Until now I have been a loyalist thinking the SkyMiles program is not that bad; but now this is insane, I find flights that have inventory and I can't ticket them... go figure...

fti

Good luck. I hope they extend the hold. But your experience doesn't surprise me in the least.

nohbdy

FWIW, I've been heavily monitoring AF availability on a few TATL routes for next summer. Over the past day or two AF has made several schedules changes and I have seen availability go from O0 to O9 to O2 etc... on some of these flights. These are flights that have had 0 O availability for the past 3 months. When I try to put these tickets on hold, I get the error from DL's website.

I wonder if AF has screwed up their inventory with the schedule changes over the past day or two. I'm going to hold out until next week to see what happens.

RealHJ

Did you try doing this through NW reservations instead of DL? If not, I think it's worth a try, as it's still two different teams and NW should be able to do AF also. Not only are the NW agents typically more helpful and far better trained than DL, also NW seems to have a policy (at least for their own flights) to sometimes ticket it weeks after booking. I had two identical flights booked. One ticketed within 5 minutes (as usually), the other one didn't ticket until nearly a month later. Though I kept calling back, each time I was told that "it'll ticket in due course" or similar, and that it has been put to the front of the ticketing queue. But, the point being that if available it can be booked and confirmed, even if not ticketed right away. Then a few weeks later the Singapore ticketing office finally did get it ticketed..