goldy

Watch out when booking elusive award tickets online. Recently when making an award booking I entered my origin and destination airports, selected between biz and econ options and was quoted an itin of CDG-AMS-BKK for 55,000 miles. At each stage of the booking process my three flights indicated all sectors were in biz, right up to quoting the tax to be deducted. I then clicked to confirm and received a booking ref. So far so good, however when I tried to select seating with KLM I was told only the MAN-CDG was in business, rest in economy.
FB initially worse than useless - I was told I should have booked each sector individually..eh? and if I wanted to cancel it would be Euro 40 !Screen prints bookibg ref meant nothing to him. So today I tried again, was on the phone to a helpfull agent who took the time to check and do a dummy booking. He saw the problem. In his dummy booking the quote was 70,000 miles oneway. Turns out he got charged 15000 miles MAN-CDG, 15000 miles CDG-AMS (both in biz) then 40000 AMS-BKK = 70000
Bottom line is IT will try to fix it but unless the expected miles show online when booking (BKK is 60000) it may be best to speak to a rep. I ended up with a promise of tax and miles back with no fee, but also no flight either

Falco Peregrinus

Sorry this has happened to you... this anomaly has now been reported here 2 or 3 times for the last month. Another victim of the now famous FB online award theorem: Conclusion: do NOT book an award flight online in business class with a connection!

Transatlantic award in J: 80,000 for 2 segments in J but 80,000 also equals 50,000 (economy for the transatlantic segment) + 30,000 for a US domestic segment in F or an intra EU segment in C.

I am even not talking about award quoted at official price in miles +/- 10K which clearly are the evidence of such a mistake.

frankvb

This even happened with the normal booking engine when trying to create complex (multi-stopover) flights. However there you would notice it quickly as the summary page (way before paying or even entering your details) showed the correct booking class for each individual flight. Quoted fares were usually suggesting J all the way though...

Gajan

I have passed it on to Flying Blue.

ofj

has this been a recent occurrence only? I've done a few dummy award searches in the past, and everything reflected correctly.........

ijgordon

Sure, if you consider 2005 as recent.

ofj

Woah. I see. It's a shame because Flying Blue often allows an additional stop for award tickets to/from Europe without any additional costs. If what the OP mentioned is the current situation, then one would be "forced" to book an additional segment for the additional stop, if flying business class was the goal.

Hmgustavo

Happened the same to me when Flying Delta booked trough LATAM. LATAM said it was listed as business on their end, Delta said it was economy. Flew economy on the long leg and business on the short leg.

ofj

Was this on a ticket booked with miles, or cash? I've booked numerous Delta flights using the AF/KLM site (long-haul PE on Delta, short-haul European economy on AF/KLM). Often, the booking says "economy" in the long-haul segment, however the ticket itself ends up saying PE (and my seats are in PE as well). Very odd!